I’m chugging away at it, and rewrites are surprisingly easier than original drafts for me. Everything’s already been written, and if something doesn’t work in one spot, well that’s okay because I can shuffle it to another spot later down the line, or just rid of it completely.
How do you handle rewrites?
I adore rewrites. So much so that I frequently get bogged down in premature revision before I finish the rough draft. Oops…
How I handle them: I tend to do major restructuring first, and once I’m happy with pacing, structure, etc., I do line-by-line editing. It’s usually in the line-by-line stage that I cut all the extra fluff (adverbs, unnecessary description, unwieldy dialogue, and the like), and it happens to be what I enjoy the most, so I tend to get stuck there in endless polishing. Do you tend to do a lot of polishing, or are you the (awesome) type of writer that can put out a near-polished first draft?
I tend to enjoy rewrites as it gives me the opportunity to tighten things up. often I will highlight a section and come back to it if I don’t feel ready to tackle it on the spot. I do get impatient on occasion if I’ve gone over a particular section several times and it still isn’t right.