The Pain and Pleasures of Rewriting

About the Author

Gary Speer

Gary Speer is a former newspaper copyeditor, a former religious journalist, and currently blogs full-time and lives off his wife. He offers writing tips regularly at Writing Tips at GarySpeer.com.

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Everything you write should be blasted out as quickly as you can possibly do so, because the only writing worth reading is that done with heat and passion. How can you expect to write passionately if you deliberate over each word, phrase, and sentence?

Or to put this another way, true or false: If you cannot turn out hundreds and thousands of passionately chosen words in a day, you really shouldn't bother to write at all.

Whether you are writing an article to market a product or website, a term paper required for a class, or the first draft of your best-selling novel, one thing is true: Nothing gets written until it IS written. So there is great wisdom in writing quickly, writing with a sense of no-holds-barred abandon. A well-published novelist acquaintance of mine used to refer to this as "silencing the editor on your shoulder."

When you write, even if you're experienced, there is almost always a critical or "editorial" voice which watches you and distracts you with its/his/her comments. You may not hear voices, but you do think such things as, "Nope, that's not exactly what I meant to say," or, "Aw, no, that'll never work." You can get rid of that guy by doing as I suggested above: Write quickly with passion, and get the words down.

Then, after you've let the writing season or cool a bit -- hours? days? -- you can go back and experience the pain and pleasure of rewriting. Rewriting can be very painful. Something you really loved, a word or phrase, when you slammed it out quickly and passionately before, suddenly sounds flat. You realize it needs to be cut. Cutting it out may hurt, but if you look honestly at your work during the rewrite phase, you'll know what or how to cut it. (If not, find a friend who writes and/or edits and trust his/her judgment.)

Rewriting is a pleasure as you look at the improved product. You realize, as someone once said, that all true writing is rewriting.

Now write. Fire up the keyboard, sharpen your pencils, refill your pen, whatever it takes, and write. Then sit back, relax, and do the REAL writing as you work at the rewrite.

Put the passionate rough drafting together with the careful rewriting and you can produce something to make yourself proud.