Sometimes you gotta throw the whole text away.
Wait, let me begin again: Happy birthday to Jess, who doesn’t always read, but who may have a Google alert set up for “Her Name”+“Shelf Life”; so who knows? Don’t worry, I’ll also tell her happy birthday privately.
Also on the topic of administration, I thank Rowin for clueing me in to how inaccessible it is when I embed a URL in the text “click here” instead of descriptive text about what the link is. Apologies to those who use screen readers to read Shelf Life and I will do this better from now on.
Let’s talk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For those who aren’t familiar with the origin of this phrase, it dates to an earlier and grosser time in human history when bathwater was a rare luxury and families had to share it. Family members bathed in the same water one by one, in a hierarchy, with the youngest member last—the baby. By then the bathwater was so dirty that it was no longer transparent and, therefore, you might forget your baby was in there when you went to dump out the gross water. I don’t know much about babies but I think if you forgot your baby in the bathwater then the situation might already be too late to salvage.
Idiomatically, it means: Don’t throw out something good in the process of dumping out the bad. In this idiom, the baby is universally acknowledged as a good thing you don’t want to throw out. That sentiment also comes from an earlier and grosser time in human history. Listen: If someone handed me a baby to take care of I would be looking for the first opportunity to throw it out. I don’t like kids till they are old enough to walk, talk, and help us overthrow the capitalist overlords.
If you have written an entire manuscript, first of all, good for you. And if you have not yet completed or even started your manuscript—also good for you. If you’re reading today you’re looking ahead to the revision you’ll tackle one day. A writer who understands their first draft won’t be their last draft is always ahead of the game, in my opinion. Either way, high five yourself.
Some time back I wrote a Shelf Life on Attack[ing] Your First Revision. In that article I outlined a four-step plan: Get some distance from the manuscript, then read it again end to end, then make an action plan, and then dive into the actual revision. This is all still true. Whether you’re revising or full-on rewriting, you should do that four-step process first. If you haven’t read that oldie-but-goodie, it’s good companion reading for today’s essay.
Sometimes revising is a lot like editing. I go through my manuscript (in step two, the reread after getting distance) and make notes of what I want to add, remove, change, rework, and so on. “Introduce this element earlier”; “more emphasis on this element throughout”; “these two characters could be combined”; stuff like that. Then, I can form my action plan and go through again, targeting exactly the things that will bring my manuscript into sharp focus.
This is how I revise other people’s manuscripts too, by the way. This isn’t something you can hire me to do at this exact moment in my life but I’ve done it a lot, for 1099s and W2s both (happy tax season). This is the trade secret methodology: I read the manuscript all the way through first before I begin editing or revising. I make a lot of notes as I go, and I might fix little stuff like typos where I see them, but I want to have a sense of the whole piece, in full, before I start making real changes and suggestions.
During this process of rereading with fresh eyes—as fresh as you can get them—you may sometimes experience a terrible realization:
No amount of revising is going to make this section (or this whole manuscript) as good as I want it to be. I need to throw it out and start again.
Screaming emoji three times, am I right?
You might know right away, the first time you read the text, that it’s never going to work as written. Or you might have hope that iterative revision can eventually get it where it needs to be, but after rounds and rounds of hacking away at it you realize the bones won’t support what you want to do. If there’s a major problem with something like structure, pacing, point of view, narrative voice—revising can’t always do the job.
I want to talk about what it means to rewrite versus revise. After you’ve been through your reread with notetaking and decided a revision won’t cut it, how do you begin rewriting? How do you decide what’s baby and what’s bathwater?
I’m going to walk you through two rewriting case studies from my own personal writing life and cover how I decided a rewrite was necessary (instead of a revision), how I planned out the rewrite, and how I got down to executing.
Recently I completed a short story and I couldn’t figure out if I was happy with it or not. To give a little context, I’m four short stories into a one-short-story-a-month push from October 2021 to October 2022 so, first, I’m making good headway, and second, I know not every single story that comes from this challenge will be a banger. That’s okay. That’s why I write short stories and not just longform fiction (and, like, essays by the dozen): Because when I finish a short story and the concept didn’t work or whatever, I’m not throwing out a novel’s worth of work.
I finished a story and I shared it with some readers, got some early feedback (positive), and thought about a revision plan. Even though the feedback was mostly positive and the criticisms didn’t indicate a full overhaul, I just couldn’t figure out if I was happy with it and I didn’t know why. I thought, “My early readers liked it, why is my own brain not on board?”
My brain wasn’t on board because I had turned out a perfectly adequate story for any reader who did not have access to the original concept, which was much more robust and nuanced. The draft was already overlength, I couldn’t find anything to cut (neither could the readers, who I specifically asked to point out wasted words if they saw any), but I didn’t feel like it even approached the vision I had for it. A lot of things were missing.
Somewhat-related side note: Ted Chiang, a living master of short fiction, once declined a Hugo nomination (his editor put him forth without checking with him first) because he felt the nominated story was not representative of his best work.
This short story was fine but it was not representative of my best work or the vision I originally had for it. The more I thought about how to revise it, the more I realized complete teardown and redo was called for. I hadn’t captured the right narrative voice, the right tone or ambience, and most important the original concept had a layer of ambiguity to it. The reader was meant to contemplate how much of the story was a true account of the character’s experience versus how much is embellished/imaginary, whether or not there was a supernatural element to the story or an unreliable narrator.
Put me on pause now and read “That Story Isn’t the Story” by John Wiswell and then come back. It can only improve understanding of the previous paragraph.
This story, I realized—mine, not Wiswell’s—was a case for a full-blown rewrite, no holds barred. A rewrite, or the trunk: The place given-up-on stories go to be forgotten. It would not have been the first adequate-but-not-adequate-enough story I’ve consigned to the trunk.
This one’s not in the trunk yet. I’ve spent some time with a notebook (like an actual paper notebook) close at hand, lying around staring at the ceiling and trying to banish the actual story as it’s written from my mind so I can retrieve the earlier version (always mind your version control!) from my brain. I have copious notes from before I started that I can rely on, read and reread, to get back to that mindset.
Then we do the gap analysis: Compare the current manuscript with the desired manuscript—the manuscript in my imagination that somehow has all the amazing elements packed into it—then identify and document the gap. What is missing from the current draft that the imaginary perfect manuscript has, and also what are the things the current draft has that the imaginary perfect manuscript omits. Theoretically, the gap goes both ways.
I ask myself: What’s baby, and what’s bathwater? Baby: The character, the main events of the plot. Bathwater: The narrative voice, the theme, the tone, the mood, and at the heart of it all, the execution of narrative tension that makes the reader waver from “I definitely think there’s a touch of the supernatural in this story” to “okay, I was wrong this is just a narrator with a vivid imagination”—and back. That’s easier said than done, especially in under five thousand words. More screaming emojis, for good measure.
What’s the new draft like? Not finished, for one thing. On paper, writing a short story every month doesn’t sound like a lot probably. Twenty-five hundred words is plenty for a short story. I write two Shelf Lifes around that long every week. But when they’re piling up needing revision, beta reads, editing, submission, and then just managing and keeping track of where all of them are at any given time, it gets time consuming. The rewrite of this story is on the backburner, but I have put in the time with it to do the gap analysis and planned out how to attack the next draft strategically so that the outcome is closer to the vision for this story—hopefully close enough that revision will close the rest of the distance.
The other rewrite I want to talk with you about is a doozy. I have an old novel-length manuscript languishing in a drawer for a really long time. Regarding “the drawer,” I’ve found manuscripts either get out of it in a couple weeks or they get a one-way ticket to the trunk. I had lost interest in revising this one years ago after realizing that it just was going to need a lot of work. It had the same problem a lot of writers’ early works have (get ready because this might be your manuscript): It really picked up after a few chapters but the start was slow, overladen with exposition, and just not interesting enough to drag readers bodily into the story.
If you have ever had feedback from someone that they couldn’t get into your story and you’ve told yourself, “Well it really picks up in chapter two, can’t they give it a little more of a chance?” Perk up your ears. Most stories that are going to lose me lose me before the end of the first chapter. If I’m not grabbed by then, I’m probably not going to be grabbed. If I have been grabbed, I’m probably not going to be ungrabbed after that. Uh, let go. Released.
A lot, a lot, a lot of early drafts of novels could benefit from having the entire beginning lopped off or rewritten from scratch. With this novel, I’d had a handful of revision attempts to get that first chapter more engaging, faster paced, less exposition, more dialogue, but however I messed with it, it just never reshaped into the compelling start I wanted.
One evening recently, in bed for the night and falling asleep, and having not thought a single thought about this manuscript in probably three years or more, my brain out of nowhere reconceptualized the entire beginning of the book. Having now put a brand-spanking new chapter one on it (old chapter one has sailed into the discard file), I can see exactly what needed to happen to surmount this bad beginning and I can tell you exactly how I did it.
Some of the most ubiquitous advice for starting a story is to begin it as close as possible to the inciting incident. Start as late as you can without leaving out anything critical to the book. I have always understood that to mean, whatever the incident is that changes your main character’s life and starts them on the journey they’re taking in the story, you need to start as close as possible to that. Rethinking this book’s opening gave me a new perspective on starting “as late as possible”—I started it right before the character takes on the job that will change their life, with just enough context for the reader to understand how they came to be in a position to take this job. However: The character has just come from a job that had an action-packed, character chemistry–heavy, dramatic conclusion, which the character summarizes later for a friend.
I had originally taken “starting as late as possible” too literally. In hindsight, the best place to start this story is in medias res of the previous job as it’s wrapping up. This means dropping the reader directly into a situation that will be somewhat uncomfortable for them until they get their footing (see my very recent article on the Discomfort Gambit) but it also lets me start off with questions that, I hope, will press readers on to learn the answers.
This rewrite is what I started out thinking of as a partial: There are some parts of this manuscript that are just fine and I only need to rewrite text until I’ve written over the slow start and caught up to where it gets compelling. However, in the process, I found I was able to improve the main character’s voice a great deal, making it much more distinct and lively. Now my work’s cut out, right? It’s all or nothing.
Again, I had to ask myself: What’s baby, what’s bathwater? Baby: The plot, the characters, the worldbuilding, the themes. Bathwater: The narrative voice, the exposition overload, the order of events as told by the narrator (if not the chronology of actual events), and at least the first ten thousand words. That’s like one-seventh or one-eighth of a novel. That’s a lot of words, but they go fast when you already know where you’re going and you just need to take a different creative route to get there.
A fun fact about Shelf Life is, I never rewrite these. I put them out too fast, there’s not too much time for editing and revision. That’s not the case with fiction, which I put through brutal revisions before it goes out the door. If Shelf Life has taught me anything, it’s that I should phone stuff in more. We need to move away from the idiomatic meaning of “phoning [something] in” to mean you gave it very little effort, where I guess the example of giving more effort would be to show up in person. Listen, nobody wants you to show up in person. The phone call is actually too much effort by today’s standard—people rather have a text. Whatever the even-lower-effort of communication than a text message is, that should be the new idiom for being lazy.
Don’t emoji it in, guys. Put in the effort and send a text.
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