Rewriting – An Introduction

It is unlikely that the first version will work best. Sometimes editorial changes (rather than rewriting) might make a positive difference:

From Malvern we looked down the line of beautiful hills to where the storm clouds gathered.

Might be changed to:

From Malvern we looked down the line of sunlit hills to where storm clouds gathered.

‘Beautiful’ has been replaced with themore descriptive ‘sunlit’ and ‘the’ has been removed.

In most cases, before fine editing, there is a fundamental problem with the approach:

After waiting for over half an hour for their guide they decided to leave the station and climb the hills using maps they had brought with them. What was supposed to be a moderately easy country walk soon turned into something much more dangerous. They were lost and what had been a sunny day had become cold and stormy.

This extract lacks suspense. It is hard to empathise with the situation due to:

  • a lack of characterization – we do not know who are lost and cold
  • rushing the material
  • the narrator telling rather than showing the scenes – ‘What was supposed to be..’ rather than describing the scene and how the characters reacted/related to it.

In a case like this a complete rewrite is needed, often without reference to the first version. By freeing yourself from the original structure, yet bearing in mind narrative, characters and description it is possible to build empathy and therefore suspense and readability.

Sometimes, rather than rushing the material there might be an inclination to linger:

Confused, irritated, they waited for the much maligned guide to arrive as the perfect walking weather became a monstrosity of boiling black clouds.

Here the ‘monstrosity of boiling black clouds’ is an overwritten image. When thinking about how to rewrite, clichés can start to take over: ‘bruise black clouds’, ‘crow black clouds’. Again, a complete rewrite might be needed. Drawing the scene can often give a new approach. Were the clouds the most important image? Or was it the characters’ reactions to the clouds that should have led the scene?

A change of focusis often needed before fine editing. In this version future problems are being set up:

He’d been dreading this trip for months and as he stepped from the train the grinning group with their anoraks and plastic wrapped maps confirmed his fears. The guide was late so it had been decided they would start without him. John disagreed but somehow got swept along by the decision. Anyway, the sunlit hills seemed safe enough.

The clouds will blow in later
This work by Paul Bavister is licensed by the University of Oxford under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence.