Author Blog: Ian Douglas

Rewrites? We don't need no stinkin' rewrites.

      I’ve often been asked how many times I rewrite a book in progress, or how many drafts I go through from concept to finished manuscript. Truthfully, I tend to write straight through, beginning to end. I may go back to an earlier chapter and change a few lines as new concepts occur to me. If I get stuck, a great way to get unstuck is to go back and reread the last ten pages or so, changing a word or a phrase here and there as I move forward. But rewrite, as in throwing out a couple of chapters and doing them over? No way!

     In my very first series, eighty books or so ago, I was happily charging through the third book of a military time-travel series for Berkely called Freedom’s Rangers. I turned in a 140,000 word manuscript set in the American Revolution, then found out they'd decided the books should only be 100,000 words long. Grumblegrumble. I ended up tearing that book in half, adding to both pieces, and submitting two books, the first set at Brandywine called Raiders of the Revolution, the second at Saratoga called Search and Destroy. (Not my titles, by the way!) That worked pretty well, as I recall. But that's the most rewriting I've ever done on a work in progress.

     Back when I mentored genre writing students at a local college, I frequently advised them to avoid rewriting at all costs. Your first take on something is usually the best, sharpest, and most vivid. When you go back and rewrite, all too often you end up flogging it to death, changing and re-changing and re-re-changing a scene until all the life is beaten from the poor thing. If you have bad literary habits--too avid a use of adjectives, say--you can go back in a light edit and watch out for problems along the way, but it's more efficient if your writing style is clean from the git-go.

     There's also the problem of time. Just as many wanna-be writers spend all their time in research and never actually start writing, there's a class of new writer that endlessly polishes, trying to make sure it's perfect before they submit it. I'm remembering a novel by Sartre—don't recall the title, but it was about a writer who kept writing the same book over and over again, opening it with a cowboy riding into town "on a red sorrel mare." He never finishes the thing, never even gets past the opening line, as I recall, and never figures out that red is sorrel and therefore redundant, but just endlessly rewrites the damned thing. Sartre was really into the whole futility of life thing.

     I don't care how polished a book is, people are going to find fault with it. You will not be able to anticipate all of their criticisms, and what doesn't work for one critic may be another reader's favorite bit. You simply can't anticipate how it will be received. So go with your first instinct, and never look back!

Comments

[Daniel Harper]

"I'm remembering a novel by Sartre—don't recall the title, but it was about a writer who kept writing the same book over and over again, opening it with a cowboy riding into town "on a red sorrel mare." He never finishes the thing, never even gets past the opening line, as I recall, and never figures out that red is sorrel and therefore redundant, but just endlessly rewrites the damned thing. "

This was _The Plague_.

[John]

Sorry if there is a better place to post this, but in Star Strike, towards the end, when the Hermes is trying to get out of the way of the expected blast through the gateway, it reads that Garroway is on the ops couch, etc., when it seems that Gen. Alexander is the one who should be conning Hermes. Garroway is unconscious aboard the trigger ship. Or am I crazy?

[Jeff]

No John, you have it correct with Alexander mysteriously surrendering the Ops Couch for a marine Sargent for the entire paragraph. Just go with it. Space opera triple trilogies are just going to encounter this. It is so much easier picking away at a great story when you're the one who paid eight bucks a pop for each book.