Is it Too Late To Rewrite Everything?
On Making Peace With Your Work
Hey friends,
Exciting times here at A&B HQ! My galleys for Write Through It came in! I can’t wait to show you everything I’ve got in the works. In the meantime, yesterday I completed the Second Pass review of the book. Here’s what the means.
The lifecycle of a book is thus. When you first write the book, it’s a manuscript. If you work on it some you’ll have a first draft or second draft or even final draft manuscript. Then you’ll have an edited manuscript, after you or your editor has edited it, and then you might have a line-edited manuscript. This is a closer edit done by your editor, where they might suggest different wording or point out unclear structure or remind you the character’s name is Sara, not Sarah. Once that’s done, the book will be reviewed by your copy editor (aka copyedited manuscript) and after that the book will be typeset and designed. That draft will look like a real book, at least the inside of one.
From there, you’ll get to review the First Pass (1P) and that should incorporate all the changes you made (or didn’t make) in response to your copyedit. Why do you have to check this? Because it’s your book and humans make mistakes! You might have also had some lingering tk tk tks, or finally nailed down that detail that had been evading you, and need to update that part. You know your book best, so you’re the one who’s going to catch if the right title to chapter three is there or if the graph on page 198 is correct. After that, you could get a chance to review the 2P, and maybe even the 3P. Last we counted, I had read my own book six times. Now it’s seven! I caught a few little things in this 2P, but overall, it’s looking very good. I might get a 3P, but I don’t know if we need it.
Everything looks good except—I WANT TO REWRITE IT ALL. I mean, if they’d let me, I might rewrite whole chapters of this book. They won’t and I won’t, but boy howdy, the urge to rewrite is strong.
Why can’t I rewrite the book at this point? Because we’d have to go through ALL the steps mentioned here again and that would take months and months. We don’t have months and months if we want to hit the pub date. (June 10th, 2025) No, they can’t just make an exception for me this one time. No, they can’t do a quick edit, design, and copyedit. If I were to even just cut (more than) a few paragraphs or pages, it would change the whole interior design and have to be completely redone.
The thing is, I want to rewrite it because I’ve read it seven times. This is both a good and bad thing. It means I’ve had that many times to read a sentence, a paragraph, a section, and think about whether it makes sense, it could have been said better, it needs to be there. It also means I’ve had that many times to get sick of it. Familiarity breeds contempt, right? I want to rewrite things because I’m tired of looking at them.
I don’t need to rewrite things, even on top of the fact that I cannot. It’s fine. The book is good (imho). It will make sense to those who have not read it seven times through, who probably won’t ever read it seven times through. The average reader will not get as sick of my sentences as I have, and that’s good news. It’s fine. It’s more than fine.
The lesson to learn from this is if I want to avoid this urge to rewrite, I need to build in a lot more runway before I even turn in the manuscript. That’s not always possible but it would (I think) cure me of this feeling. If I had time to let the first draft marinate and then read it over five or six times (lol, maybe just three or four), I would probably do a lot more rewriting and that might make me feel better at the 2P and 3P stage. Or not! Maybe I’d still want to rewrite everything! The only way to find out is to write another book and try. And the only way to do that is to get cracking.
I don’t think I’ll ever be so far ahead of schedule that I can finish a draft three or four months ahead of when it’s due, but I do think that next time, I will work in as much editing time as I can. It may or may not change the final manuscript. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’ll report back when I write another book.
What shall we uncover from the depths of Agents & Books? Here’s today’s throwback post!
Thanks for reading, friends. Call your senators and representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I know I am today.
OXOXOXOOXOXOX,
Kate
What's a typical advance? That's gettin a little ahead of yourself : )
If we wait until the book is perfect, it may never get published :) I so relate to this feeling of wanting to keep editing and editing and editing. We're in this together!