Birth of a novel, or Why Rewriting Sucks

Today is another installment of Birth of a Novel. If you haven't heard of this, hop on over to Charity's Blog, and sign up on the linky. 

I try not to talk about my troubles, but let’s face it, I’m TMI waiting to happen. So when I found myself full of free time I thought, “Oh hey, I’ll crank out the rest of this novel in like a week.” That was pretty much three weeks ago now. Yeah. That’s not really going the way I’d planned.

At first I thought, Oh, this is just the usual writer anxiety, it comes and it goes. In the mean time, I’ll just watch Dance Academy (a surprisingly good Australian Ballet drama). And when I’d plowed through those, I thought, “Oh, well, I’m just redefining myself as a person rather than a job.” That’s when I started watching Glee.

And still, no writing. I blogged. I talked with people, I cleaned house, anything to not write. What was killing my words?

Then it hit me, I was avoiding my novel.

Writing a novel is full of ups and downs. The ups sound like “Oh my galena, this is the greatest story, and I wish I could ship it off to agents Right NOW so it can hit the New York Times bestseller list sooner.” The downs: “Well, that was a complete waste of time. I wonder if I should even finish drafting it. I mean really, who’s ever going to pay money for this trite POS?”

But when you’re rewriting, it’s worse. With a rewrite, there are no really big surprises, you’ve already done that. You’ve already been there. You’ve already explored all the original (well, original to you) points that made you think you had the novel of pure awesome. In a rewrite, you see that not only has it been done before (by you) it’s been done before by like fifty other people over the last ten years. Yikes. It seems old, worn out, and you start to doubt.

Why am I even rewriting this novel? It wasn’t that good to begin with, and now that I’m rewriting, I know that it sucks. I’ve had vacuums with less suction than this novel.

And it’s not nearly as exciting because you’ve already done it.

So I started writing again. I gave myself permission to suck, because even though this is a rewrite, so much has changed that it’s back to a first draft. And first drafts suck. Sure this first draft might be a little more focused, you know, with the whole actually knowing the plot and the point of view (both aspects I’d screwed up the first time).

Now if I can just keep that Shiny New Idea at bay and finish...

So what about you, do you hate rewriting as much as I do? Or do you view rewriting as an opportunity to sweep all those mistakes under the revision rug?

Goals:

* Finish the rewrite of PRINCESS SINGULARITY by next week (this should be less than 10,000 words, so this shouldn’t be a problem).

* Make a decision about revising the super hero novel

* Draw more maps for the Shiny New Idea, more on that one later