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Chapter 24: Reviewing and Rewriting Your Work
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The first draft isn’t wasted. You’ve found your characters and have a much
better idea of the plot when you sit down to write again. Never literally tear up
the first draft – you may need to refer to it. You may want to retrieve a lovely
sentence or image or check something you wrote earlier.
Here I describe some big changes that you may need to make to a first draft.
Taking a different viewpoint
One of the largest forms of rewriting is to change the point of view. The voice
and point of view are so important to a story that, inevitably, changing these
aspects radically changes your story.
Here are a few common situations that you may face:
✓ Suppose you start off with a third-person limited narrative, but find that
you’re using long chunks of interior monologue and free indirect speech
(flip to Chapter 7 for a description of these). You need to ask yourself
whether the story would be more natural told in the first-person narrative.
(Chapter 8 has all you need to know on third- and first-person styles.)
✓ Suppose your first-person narrative feels claustrophobic and you want
to open the story up into more viewpoints. Would you be better making
it third-person limited?
✓ Suppose you picked an omniscient narrator but find that the story now
feels far too distant and old-fashioned. Can you personify the narrator?
Can you write the story from the point of view of an observer who’s
also a character? Sometimes an observer narrator is the best option –
someone who views the characters from the outside. Or perhaps you
can recast your narrative using multiple narrators. Again, check out
Chapter 8 for all about using different viewpoints.
Changing character and location names
You may be surprised that I include this type of change here. Surely, changing
the character’s name is fairly minor – simply a matter of searching and
replacing (perhaps on the computer).
I’ve experienced many writers deciding to change the names of their main
characters late on in the novel, and in every single case doing so changed
the character so radically that the whole novel started to transform itself or
fall apart. A name is so much a part of a person that when you alter it, many
aspects of the character change too.