Rewrite Your First Draft, Revise Your Last

elumish:

I’m currently rewriting my first (or, as I think of it, my
1.5) draft of one of my novels. It is long. It is arduous. It is taking me
forever, and I have spent a lot of time opening it, staring at it, and then
going to do something else.

It is also necessary.

While all forms of revision are necessary, different ones
should be used at different times. At the start of the process—after you have
completed a full draft of your story—you should rewrite. At the end of your
process, you should revise.

Here’s why:

Rewriting, in this case, means starting a new document—or a
new notebook, if you like writing by hand—and writing every word of a new draft.
(Small amounts of copy-paste are okay, I guess, if necessary.) Usually this is
done with the old draft open next to the next draft, but depending on the
amount of work that needs to be done, there can be significant changes made.

Revising means taking an existing document and going through
line by line to find awkward passages, grammatical mistakes, and typos.

The reason that rewriting should be the first thing that you
do is that it allows you a lot more freedom—logistically and mentally—to make
major changes to your story. Need to add a scene? Just write it in. Need to cut
a character? That’s much easier to decide beforehand and rewrite the scenes
around them rather than trying to cut them out line by line. You can see your
old work and refer to it, but you’re not constrained by the way it’s written.

On the other hand, by the time you get to your last draft—which
might be draft three, or draft ten, you shouldn’t be changing entire scenes.
Your entire story should be written, and you should just be polishing it.

I know rewriting is miserable. I know you don’t want to
rewrite. I know it would be easier to just do a pass-through, fix grammatical
mistakes, and call it a day. But for 99% of writers, your first draft isn’t
good enough to do that. So take the time. Rewrite. You’ll thank me later.