Writing is Okay, Re-writing Sucks

[chris_gerrib]

After my first readers took a look at Space Rescue, the latest novel cluttering up the hard drive, I found myself forced to do a serious re-write. What happened was:

1) One POV character went from "forced to be bad by circumstances" to "wanna-be Evil Mastermind (In Her Own Mind)." This led to:

2) A need to rewrite all of her chapters. (Yeah, d'uh!) Except she'd done something stupid which allowed the good guys to find out where she was. But now that she was a Bad Guy, she wouldn't do. This led to:

3) A rewrite of more chapters, in which the Good Guys do plain-ole-fashioned detective work in lieu of getting information handed to them.

If this looks like a row of dominoes, it should. I guess that's a sign I'm doing better as a writer - if things weren't interweaved, the story would be off.

In addition to the above mess, I have a too-quick "commit to action" for one of my characters. That's tomorrow's high-pitched whine blog post.

Comments

[knockout-mouse.livejournal.com]

You know what, I've always liked editing better than writing the first draft. I told an English teacher this once and she said I was weird for it.

[eclectic338.livejournal.com]

Look at the good side, you could be doing it with my 130k words, instead of your 60k (or whatever it's up to now). :-)

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

80K, actually.