Tag Archive: First Draft


Don’t Fear the Rewrite

Filed under: Editing — 1 Comment
April 14, 2023

Writing a book can be a lot of work. I’ve talked before about how even a complete amateur can get through a first draft in as little as three months with just a couple hours of work per day, but chances are you were thinking, plotting, planning, and obsessing over that manuscript for months, and probably years, before you ever wrote down the first chapter. That’s a lot of investment, and it’s not uncommon for a first book to take years to write when you’re just starting out (or are named George R. R. Martin, but that’s another story).

When you put that much of your heart and soul into a project, tearing it all down to do it again is daunting. “Will it actually improve?” “Is this the best I can do?” “Why redo it from scratch when the story is complete?” “Can’t I just, y’know, edit it a bit?” “What if I spend more time doing it right the first time?” “If it needs rewriting, doesn’t that mean it sucks and I’m a terrible writer?”

The answer to those questions, in order, are: yes; no; because it’s not actually from scratch; no author is that perfect; then you’re actually wasting time and effort; and stop telling yourself that.

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“Adverbs,” He Said Professorially

Filed under: Writing Tips — 2 Comments
April 17, 2015

I took a creative writing course at my first college. I dropped it later, because the professor didn’t know how to actually teach creative writing. That’s not to say that I knew what I was doing; I’d been writing since I was eleven, and by the time I took this professor’s class I was told by one professional author and another English professor that I was publishable, but I (today) wouldn’t consider myself (then) to know what I was talking about any more than that professor. I learned far more from the assigned texts than I did from her.

The problem with many creative writing courses is that they spend a lot of time teaching you what not to do rather than what you should do. That’s a lot easier, I suppose; as I frequently say, writing is an art, not a science. There are a few ways to fail, and an near-infinite number of ways to succeed. It’s easier to talk about what not to do. The problem is that these courses go on and on with their rules rather than treating it as an art form. When I teach writing, I actually approach it the same way one might teach drawing or painting: here’s some stuff to try, and here’s how to refine it. The rules of fiction aren’t the laws of physics.

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One such rule, which this professor was quite strict on, is one that many of you will no doubt have heard. Don’t use adverbs. The professor in question was even more specific: “Don’t use -ly words.” Whether she didn’t care about adverbs that didn’t end in -ly or she just thought we didn’t know what an adverb was, I don’t know; it could honestly have gone either way. (You can tell I didn’t enjoy that class.)  Continue reading →

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