On Writing and Re-Writing
Writing is a funny, two-part process. The first part is the fun part, where you write and write and it almost feels like someone else is writing. In that state you might feel you would explode if you didn’t get it all out—in fact, one famous poet, Lord Byron, described this feeling when he said that poetry is “the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.” If you write, you know what I mean—it’s like you’re on a runaway horse and you have no control over where your story is going. All writers experience this, and it’s thrilling and exhilarating and very frustrating. I once read that Frank Baum’s wife discovered him one day throwing things in his study because the characters of the Land of Oz wouldn’t do what he wanted them to do. It’s true. Characters are like children: they insist on having minds of their own, even when you don’t think they should—and when you let them alone, they come up with the most remarkable inventions. One of the most important things I've learned about being a writer is that the best writing happens when you just let it happen.
But because the creative part of writing is (and should be!) so undirected, you need to use your analytical, thinking brain to impose order on the messy inspired part. In other words, writing needs revision (I personally revise each of my novels upwards of thirty times). And revision means a lot more than just using your best handwriting and correcting your spelling. It means improving your language, choosing better words, making the sentences flow together. It means expanding the interesting parts of your story and cutting the boring parts that were just there because you didn’t know what to write. (It’s very freeing to know you can just chuck it out, rather than struggle to make it better!) It means making sure that your characters grow consistently from the beginning to the end of your story. It means taking out the things you thought were going to be important that ended up not mattering and beefing up the beginning the things you only realized were important later. (In the original drafts of Hercules, for example, I didn’t get around to introducing the secondary major character, Juna Loch, until the eleventh chapter, which is pretty late. In its finished form, you get a glimpse of her right from the beginning—she became an important part of Hercules’ decision to run away to the mice, and I think this is an improvement.)
For me, the easiest part of rewriting is improving the language. This is especially true now that I have learned the essential trick that often the best way to improve a sentence is to make it shorter. (This can be tricky. As Thomas Jefferson used to quote, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”).
The most difficult part for me (and probably the most important) is to work on character arc. This is something I didn’t understand until I was over 30 years old, but you might be more sophisticated than I was. What do I mean by arc? I mean the ways in which the characters and situations change from the beginning of the story to the end. (Just as an arch-shape can provide the tension to hold up a heavy bridge, the tension of the story or character arc holds up the weight of a whole novel.) In a good story, things change—your hero should be a slightly different person (or mouse, or dragon) by the end of the story. Careful rewriting can help you make sure that those changes happen slowly and consistently over the course of your whole story. Ideally, I’d argue, you should know where you are in a book not just by what’s happening but by what’s happending in the main character’s emotional state. In Hercules, for example, I worked hard to figure out how Hercules goes from a boy terrified of everything to someone able to confront his worst fears. I wanted it to happen slowly, subtly, so that he didn’t suddenly find his heroic side all of a sudden on page 183; I also didn’t want him to go back and forth between terror and heroism on every page. That might be the way it would be, if he were a real person, but one of the most important things I’ve learned about literature is that it’s not the same as life. It may be the way people really are, but it’s boring to watch a character keep going back and forth between two emotions.
To use another example, I think J.K. Rowling missed a great opportunity in the sixth Harry Potter book, where we see Harry really growing up and putting aside childish things. In the book, Harry is finally made Quiddich captain, but although he’s really excited about it, he keeps getting distracted by noticing that Malfoy is up to something during the games. This shows that Harry is changing from previous years, where Quiddich is at the center of his life. But I think JKR could have made her point more compellingly if she’d let Harry bask in being captain for the first game, refusing to follow Malfoy (because, come on, he’s captain!) and then almost missing the second game because he’s beginning to realize what Malfoy’s doing is more important than a game. In the book, Harry misses the third game because he has detention, but I think it would have been much more satisfying if he had chosen to miss it because he truly understands that there’s no time for games any more. We kinda get that point without that, but how much better if we see Harry getting it! It wouldn’t have really changed the plot, but I think it would have made the book deeper.
During revision you can also make sure your characters are consistent. In writing Beyond the Dragon Portal, for example, I had always assumed that the character of Phoebe was essentially my funny and creative daughter Mattie. It was only when my editor politely pointed out that Phoebe had become a very literal-minded and stubborn (and dragon-like) child that I realized that the Mattie-like flights of fancy just didn’t fit, no matter how hard I tried to force them. (Again, forcing them doesn’t work.) Similarly, revision can help differentiate your characters from one another. In the same way you can probably guess which of your friends typed a note to you without knowing which one it was, you should be able to tell which character would do or say a certain thing.
When I was writing The Pluto Project, for example, one of the main challenges I had in revision was making the two main female characters different from one another. While I was first writing the book, I didn’t really distinguish clearly between their characters. My editor helped me see that the two girls were really very different—one of them, Alice, was very smart, unsentimental, and a great match for the main character, Alan, while the other, Juliet (the one Alan likes) is committed, passionate, but not exceptionally bright. Once I realized my editor was right, I found lots of places where I had given Juliet dialog that really belonged to Alice, and I began to see that the brilliant ideas Juliet had really needed to come from other characters. And doing that made the book much richer, because it adds to the story that Alan (who really values wit and intelligence) should find himself attracted to someone for her passion and not for her brains. Plus, it makes the book more real, to have supporting characters who are really their own people.
Sometimes struggling with revisions makes you realize something about your book you didn’t before. In my new novel, Dear Anjali, there’s a mean girl, Wendy, who does nasty things like telling the main character Meredith that she shouldn’t be in the playground because there’s no dogs allowed there. Wendy is an amalgamation of all the mean girls I have ever met (and, as Meredith would say) all the mean girls I haven’t met, either)—but she’s also friends with the boy Meredith likes. Many early readers felt I needed to explain why Noah would be friends with someone who was so mean, and several suggested I make Meredith realize that Wendy had some back story that explained her meanness. I didn’t want to. Wendy is just a jerk, and I didn’t want to have Meredith (or anyone) have to feel sorry for her. But in working out a solution that allowed Noah to be friends with Wendy and not be a jerk himself through the transitive property, I realized (and then Meredith realized) that people are not always the same person—who you are depends on who you’re with. And that became part of Meredith’s larger arc in coming to grips with her best friend’s death. So, in conclusion: rewriting makes your work better by making you think better. Plus, it’s fun.