Rewriting: Polishing the Parts
Rethinking the Writing Process, Part V
One of those nebulous areas of interrelation is editing and rewriting. It makes no sense to proofread what needs to be rewritten, after all. Throughout the editing process for any piece you will do some rewriting. Even a professional drafter will go through his phase, no matter how closely he works with and trusts his editor. Even though it is a subset of the editing process where you are sculpting the draft, it bears some talking about because it is here the bloodiest battles of the writing life are fought.
As a professional editor, I tend to look at rewriting as the step where I pass off the work to the author to see what he does with my comments and advice. He drafted it, I made my review and compiled my report for him, and soon enough it will come back to me for proofing and then off to be published. It is teamwork, baton-passing. When I work on my own projects, I pretend to put on and take off caps. Now I’m the author, now I’m the editor. It helps to focus on my primary job in that moment instead of all the surrounding work and fuss.
Rewriting is a battle won in the psychological realm
It exposes our doubts and insecurities while revealing how confident we are in our work to someone else, even if it is to ourselves wearing a different hat. Surrendering your draft exposes your work to a level of perusal that causes doubt — even if it returns a ringing endorsement. Sometimes the drafter says “Oh no, what if there’s more wrong? I must do it again & again until perfect!” and of course it never will be. Naturally if there are doubts about the goodwill or competence of the editor, these too will roil up to diminish the work. Confidence is key. A useful definition comes from psychotherapist and author Esther Perel who says confidence “is your ability to see yourself as a flawed person, and still hold yourself in high regard. Confidence is your ability to tolerate uncertainty, without thinking that if you don’t know you’re not worthy.” Lack of confidence will shipwreck your writing here, during editing and rewriting, no matter how good your helpers are.
Thicken your skin by exposure
Ultimately, the best way to build confidence is to show your work to people, both those you do respect and those who you already know you can safely ignore if you need to. If you only approach experts, you’ll feel incompetent as they pick at your efforts and appear to casually do better without preparation. If you approach only laymen, you’ll have difficulty maintaining your improvements. You’ll get used to criticism from all angles as well, which is a nice feature. Consider writing things just to build your confidence and just to practice getting criticism — write something godawful and see who gives you honest feedback. There is nobody who writes a completely perfect draft, so you must have confidence to get over this hump no matter the type of writing and no matter what your publishing plans are — visit me again tomorrow to read about publishing.
What rewriting really reveals is how editing and prewriting really work together on opposite sides of your text: The value they provide is in modifying the words and arrangement. If drafting is the king — the head with a face everyone thinks of and sees and a voice everyone remembers — then editing and proofreading are your two hands and publishing is the legs you use to take your work onward.
Go ahead and take your draft, cut to pieces by the edits, and stitch it back together now. Rewrite it to fill in gaps and adjust it to suit your goals. Tomorrow we’ll talk about publishing and pushing it out the door to be effective.
