Yesterday I finished rewriting a short story I first ‘completed’ more than seven years ago. The initial idea, which I won’t relate here, came from a story my grandfather told me about one of his elderly neighbours. The resulting piece of short fiction, which I’ll call ‘Our Elderly Neighbour’, was one of the few I’d ever written that could be classified as ‘mainstream’.
I loved it. Unfortunately, no one else did. Looking back over the rejections it received between 2008 and 2010, I see they consisted entirely of form rejections except for one brutal but accurate critique: Opening all over the place; connect the ideas.
I consigned the story to the dreaded ABANDONED folder on my computer and didn’t look at it again for three years. When I did go back to it, more out of curiosity than anything, I decided the central concept and the characters were still solid. But the prose was flabby and the narrative rambled and the whole thing was in dire need of editing. So I cut it right back and began to shop the lean and mean version around.
With much the same result.
‘Our Elderly Neighbour’, I realised, fell into that unfortunate category known as ‘a story without a market’. Not literary enough for the ‘serious’ journals and not pigeonholable (what?) enough for the genre markets, it existed in an unhappy fiction limbo. So I shrugged my shoulders and laid the poor thing to rest for good.
Then, about 12 months later, I got to thinking about ‘Our Elderly Neighbour’ again (stories never truly die, not even the bad ones). I was in the shower at the time, and as the water ran down my shoulders I had an epiphany. ‘Our Elderly Neighbour’ could, with some effort, be turned into a horror story.
A couple of dedicated keyboard sessions later, my unsalable tale of love and suburban nostalgia became something altogether different. (Whether it is now sellable remains to be seen).
This saga reitirated a simple and inalienable writing truth: sometimes an author can edit and edit a story until every line of prose is Truman Capote perfect and it still won’t be enough. If a story has an undeniably good or original idea and yet is getting rejected over and over, chances are it has a fundamental flaw – there is something wrong with the structure of the plot or, as was the case with my recently published story ‘Unreal Estate’, the characters.
That’s where rewriting comes in. A good rewrite begins with letting go of any preconceived ideas and asking yourself where else that brilliant central concept might lead. Once that new direction is clear, you can begin reading through the original version and deciding what, if anything, you can keep. In the case of ‘Our Elderly Neighbour’, it remained almost unchanged aside from some minor cuts and the addition of a few scenes. ‘Old Secrets’, on the other hand, required me to ditch tens of thousands of words and start from scratch.
In an edit, the author is identifying the trees, removing the noxious ones, perhaps planting a nice native if it seems appropriate. In a rewrite, he is looking at the entire forest and asking himself if parts of it need to be cleared... or if, indeed, he needs to start planting another forest somewhere else entirely.
Nouveaux writers often find the concept of a rewrite intimidating. I know I did. First, there’s the implied insult - what the author wrote wasn’t good enough - and then, if the author can set aside his ego, he is faced with the often laborious task of finding faults in the story and trying to fix them - the literary equivalent of debugging code.
The happy news - in my experience, anyway - is that rewriting becomes easier and more fun with practise. Finding the solution to a plot issue can be just as euphoric as conceiving the original idea. Both things require creative energy, but while a ‘high concept’ is almost wholly a right-brain thing (and sometimes it feels more like ‘receiving’ than creating), rewriting demands left- and right-brain thinking, so the eventual sense of achievement is extremely rewarding. Especially when that mental effort results in a published story.