Some time ago, I came across this post on Tumblr: Writing advice you’re not going to like. I recommend reading the whole thing, but the executive summary is: do not attempt to edit your writing, instead re-write it from the ground up using the previous draft as a reference.

As predicted in the article, I didn’t particularly like the advice. But here was someone of considerable writing experience assuring me that it was a revolutionary approach. In addition, I had a story that needed some fairly drastic action if it was ever going to make it in the world. Trying the re-write-from-scratch advice seemed like a worthwhile venture.

I took my printed copy of my story, which was much scribbled on in red and green ink. I found a purple pen and did some more scribbling. Then I opened up a nice new text document on my laptop and started typing.

At this point I would like to report that the text came together in a new way, I managed radical change, the rewritten story was immediately snapped up by an important and influential journal, and will shortly be published to massive acclaim. Sadly, none of those things is true, so much as I would like to report them, I shan’t.

As a strategy, rewriting really didn’t work for me at all. I’m a decent copy-typist, so at any point in time the path of least resistance was typing what was already on the existing page. Obviously, this is equivalent to letting a paragraph stand in edit, but because you’re furiously typing it feels like you’re making huge progress. I did rewrite some sections altogether, but far more often I typed in something close to the original, then edited until there was nothing left. In short, what I did was regular editing with extra busywork.

This is, obviously, not what the original poster had in mind. The process may be sound, but my first attempt to implement it certainly failed miserably.

What struck me (hilariously after the fact) is that to some extent I’ve always done this anyway. My first draft is usually, time permitting, written in long-hand with a pen. Once the first draft is finished, I type it up and frequently do fairly drastic revising as I go. This is a completely normal part of my writing, which I had inexplicably failed to equate with someone telling me to do exactly that.

For writing anything - fiction, essays, CVs - I’ve always regarded it as a two-stage process:
1. Make it be
2. Make it be good
To be honest, doing (1) feels like the hard part. Editing something to improve it is always easier than creating something out of nothing. (That’s not to say that I don’t get stuck with editing; a story I’m very fond of has been stranded in limbo for months since I realised the ending hinged on a series of ghastly puns, and I set it down until I could come up with something better.)

I’ll certainly try the re-writing again in the future. Sadly, however, it isn’t a magic bullet.

Of course it isn’t :-)