Creative Writing Exercises For Dummies

Chapter 24

Reviewing and Rewriting Your Work

In This Chapter

Reading your work again

Taking drastic measures

Tackling a second draft

Most writing is rewriting. Think of your first draft or your initial efforts as the raw material you need in order to start putting your story together. You have to produce this material, otherwise you have nothing to work with, but you may well end up discarding much – perhaps most – of it.

After you’ve completed a rough A–Z of your story, the real work begins. During the first draft you’re getting to know your characters, capturing their voices, finding out where the plot’s going and working on some of the key scenes. Often you make a number of false starts, such as beginning to write in the first-person voice when a third-person narrative would be more effective, or in a more distant third-person style when a first-person voice would convey the character more directly.

When you get to the end of your story, you often go back to the beginning and find that your style or way of writing has developed and changed, and so you need to rewrite the start in the same style. The characters, too, may have changed. One good reason for not endlessly rewriting ...