Getting the Hang of Rewriting

by Elijah Shoemaker

Rewriting is probably the least fun part of creating a story. It doesn’t matter if that story is a novel, a short story, a poem, or anything else. In my opinion, the rewriting is the most tedious and least enjoyable part of the process. Anyone who has ever created something literary, then had to dissect it and stitch it back together, knows how painful the process is.

I recently started working on my first novel. Yay! We love you, Elijah! You can do this! Sorry. Just a little ego boost there. So I wrote out the outline and then got down to the actual writing, the first part of the creation. When I finished the first draft of my novel, I was so proud of it. I was convinced it was already golden! Then I had an author friend edit it.

I was told I had to rewrite the entire main turning point.

What?!

I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t he know that was one of the best parts of the story, of my story?

It took me a couple days’ time to get to it and start rewriting the turning point. After all, I was not happy about it. At all. But I finally bit the proverbial bullet and did it.

It hurt – excruciatingly – but I did it. I rewrote the turning point. Now, believe it or not, the episode is actually believable. So at least I can say that the process has yielded some positive results.

I thought that was it. I thought I had done the hard part, and I was past it. I was wrong.

Now I’m finding that I need to keep doing this over and over. And over. And over. The great part, the part that makes it all worth it, though, is this: my novel just keeps getting better and better as I do the editing and rewriting.

Go figure, right?

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As a child, Elijah Shoemaker fell in love with comic books. He found he could lose himself in a universe where the underdogs stood a chance at rising above. Constantly pushed around and ridiculed, Elijah found comfort in the graphic novels. Now, his goal is to bring the hope he found in those graphic novels to children in middle and high school. Bullying and a cruel caste system exist even more than they did when Elijah was growing up. He writes superhero fiction to give the youth of today a spark of confidence that they can come through victorious.