Undulating Ungulate

The horror of the situation is this: once you have sweated blood out your eyeballs for months on end and got a first draft down on paper, you will then have to read it.

And then you will discover you need to Rewrite.

There is a reason they call this phase “killing your darlings”.

While a sentence/paragraph/chunk of prose may individually be the wittiest, most wonderfully worded and altogether brilliant insight into the human condition ever committed to paper, the real question is “does it belong on this page of this chapter in this novel?”

It’s damn hard. But to get the best from your novel, you have to step past your ego and work in the service of the novel.

However, once you accept that the novel will require rewriting – that the first draft will change, possibly quite substantially – this can be quite liberating in terms of the process of writing. While no excuse for shabby writing, forget about perfection first time through. (Actually, this might change over time, but I’m implicitly aiming this advice at first-time novelists.)

Of course, it probably isn’t possible to communicate the depth and extent of this truth until you have been through it. The words are mere knowledge until converted into understanding by experience

Filed by billy at 9:45 pm under language,the moose
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