Rewriting - I did it my way...

Left a note to myself to do a blog post about rewriting. I obviously had something really exciting in mind but Heaven knows what it was at this point :D

Okay. Let me point out right now that what I'm doing at this very moment is avoiding rewriting. Rachel Aaron (2k to 10k on Amazon for Kindle) says that editing is just writing and you should learn to love it the same way you do the first draft; I'm doing my best.

It's the mess that gets me. I don't like mess. All those words lying about in the wrong place, prepositions all over the floor and will you look at this sentence structure, it looks like the cat had it.

Right now I have a shower scene. I should digress to tell you that I'm writing a gay romance at the moment as I found a call for submission that wanted stories about gay men in sports. Well, I'm gay and I like football and I can write, so for once, three out of three.

So I'm writing a steamy scene in the shower (see what I did there? Okay, it wasn't much...) and before that I have a scene where they're talking about how the showers don't work properly - yes, plumbing, get people thinking about the plumbing, nothing like a subtext that involves pipes - and before that there's a scene where they're talking about something else in the locker room.

Okay, too many scenes. We need to get through all this and on to the sex. I mean the post-game angst. Yes. That's what I mean. So I need to combine all these scenes into one.

What I use for this is the index card method. No, I don't actually write all the stuff I've already written onto index cards, that would be an awful waste of time. I cut up the pieces I've written into paragraphs. I should mention at this point that I normally use Scrivener but for this, I'd copy and paste into Open Office Writer or you could use Word if you're into supporting large corporations that are ruining the world, hey, it's your conscience.

Anyway - I paste all the affected scenes into a word processor, then divide the paragraphs up with a few spaces between them all, so it looks like one long enormous scene divided into small chunks. And believe me, at this point, chunks is what some of it is!

Then - you can print it out. I would have printed it out a while ago, but now I've got so I can do it in my head. I just look through it, decide what I want to keep and what I don't and the pieces I want to keep go back into Scrivener in a new file.

But if you want, you can print it out and actually cut it up so it is pretty much like having it all written on index cards - without the bother of writing it all out again. This is why I call it the index card method, although the pieces are not the same size and shape as index cards - what? I'm sorry if you think I'm rambling on but a pernickety eye for detail is part of being a good writer :D

And there you have it. Put the bits back together in any shape you like - try a few different things. Paste them back together and adjust to fit where they join. For me that's a lot easier than starting at the beginning and trying to fix all the mistakes sentence by sentence. Of course if you have sentences you can't bear to live without in some of the bits you're discarding, you can just take them and fit them into what you're keeping.

The good thing about this method is, it's like when you tidy the room and you have boxes for all the different things you find lying about so you can see what you've got. It spaces out the writing so you can see it more clearly and it fools your mind into thinking it's only dealing with a small paragraph at a time so it's much easier to get on with.

Right that's it for me for today. That is rewriting - my way. Off to do my own editing - and then new writing. I don't like the editing hanging over me while I'm writing more stuff, it's distracting.

BisouX, abrazo, liebe euch alle :)