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Chapter 24: Reviewing and Rewriting Your Work
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Several authors have lost entire drafts of their
work, but this didn’t stop them rewriting from
scratch. Fortunately, this nightmare is less
common in the age of computers!
✓ Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley,
lost a suitcase containing his early stories
in 1922 when she was catching a train in
Paris. After the distraught Hadley arrived
in Lausanne and told him about the loss of
his work, Hemingway immediately returned
to Paris to see if he could recover the suitcase.
He seems to have never forgiven her
for the loss, although some claim that it did
him a favour, because his later stories are
probably much better.
✓ Malcolm’s Lowry’s novel Ultramarine (1933)
was lost by his publisher, stolen from an
open-top car in London. Lowry claims
Lost manuscripts
to have rewritten the entire novel from
memory in three weeks.
✓ TE Lawrence left the manuscript of Seven
Pillars of Wisdom (1922) in the café at
Reading station. It was never found, and
the famous version is an earlier draft.
✓ Jilly Cooper took her only copy of the
manuscript of her novel Riders (1985) with
her when she went out to lunch, and left it
behind on a London bus. She didn’t finish
rewriting it for 14 years.
✓ Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the first draft
of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) in three
weeks. His wife dismissed the book as nonsense
and he burnt it. He swiftly rewrote it,
and it went on to be a major success.
Considering other large reworkings
When you’ve written the first loose draft and looked through it, you may spot
all sorts of major problems that require large revisions. In such situations,
here are some questions to ask yourself:
✓ Is the overall goal for my main character clear?
✓ Do I have enough conflict?
✓ Does the story need more suspense?
✓ Should I divide the story into parts or sections (for guidance, check out
the later section ‘Working on the overall structure’)?
To address these issues, you can introduce time pressure, increase obstacles
and create more complications for the characters.
After you answer these questions and think of solutions (by consulting
Chapter 21), you’re ready to start on your second draft.