Why It's Good to Re-Write a Novel and Another Cool Post.

Why it’s good to Re Write a Novel Have you ever decided to just put that unfinished novel away for a long time and you don’t want to see it again?  Or you finished it, edited it more times than you care to do, and you still know it needs more work.  As the author, we usually put something away for a little bit and we need a breather. Sometimes it’s good to have more than one novel in the works, so if you get stumped on one, you can then retreat to the other one and work on that for a change. It is often good to go back and re write something after some time has passed.  You can begin to see it in a new life.  What you once thought of as great writing, maybe needs some reflection on making it even better. Even the best writers need to go back and make the words better.  Don’t just settle for the fact you’ve written maybe one draft and you are calling it that is the way the novel is going to be and nothing will make it better because you believe it is perfection.  In most cases, the first draft of any work of writing is not that case.  It’s usually filled with flaws and you, the writer needs to fix things. You need to learn as part of being a really good writer, you need to as well be your own best editor.  Yes, someone else can do the editing for you, but I believe that it’s a good education for the writer to be able to learn how to edit for yourself. Be brave enough to take things out of context and change something for the better.  Maybe you started out with Georgia to be the nice innocent woman, but maybe you want to mix things up and have her be a little bad.  Make her breath a little life into the character because she comes with flaws and will be more believable if she’s not perfect. We don’t live in a perfect world and why should the characters be flawless?  We can respect a character better if you make them come with flaws and then they come to a realization about something that is going to make them change their ways.  To come to a conclusion and an ending to the novel that perhaps wasn’t there before. I’ve just recently decided to start re writing an old novel that has never been published.  It was my very first romance novel I started about eight to ten years ago, Lustful Evangelean.  I got it edited and it had some very good points in it and definitely had the flaws as well.  I had taken about two years to write it and then, I got the edited version edited by a local editor who gave it an evaluation.  It had some very good parts about it she wanted to see more of. Around that time, I decided to leave the novel in a drawer or someplace where we just want to shove the novels we’re working on for a while.  This is the time where we try to be able to eventually come back to it. I stopped writing for a little bit I think and I know I spent a few years just reading books for a while.  A writer must always be reading as well to learn to be constructive in our thoughts. Then, of course back in 2010, I was ready to jump back into the writing, worked on different things, self published my first mystery.  And then of course, dived into writing for Triond, Hubpages and starting to learn all about blogging.  Then I thought, hey, I would like to try writing my first fantasy trilogy.  Still in the midst of finishing the first book.  And the recipe books and knitting books. Finally, last night I began to write the first page of Lustful Evangelean over again.  It was kind of funny starting to read the first page of what I had written a long time ago.  I had begun to edit it again in 2010 and never got through editing the whole book.  I believe I stopped on a certain page and convinced myself I could write my first mystery novel instead.  From which Black Roses was born , edited and published. That one, I would call a hard core mystery as it’s about a stripper. And then, I’ve jumped into a fantasy trilogy which isn’t hard core.  An author can possess talents for writing many different types of books. So, as I read what I had re written a long time ago, I came to it last night with new eyes.  We grow up as writers and evolve.  I would call this novel I wrote many years ago as once being very flowery and when it is finally done and I feel it is someday completed it will have a completely different feel to it. As writers, we learn what works and what doesn’t.  What we once thought was the best writing may now be what we would want to throw in the trash.  We begin to think, “We wrote that?” We can always make the writing better.  There’s room for it to be something else entirely. I’m not quite sure where this novel is going to end up heading to, but I know I am going to make it so much better than it was before.  And when I am ready to say it’s completed, it will be time to figure out how to format and publish it.
Jennifer Jo Fay Copyrighted June 5, 2013




Just when do you call the Novel Done? What do all you writers out there think about the writing process?  When do you call your novels done?  Some of us writers participate in NaBloPoMo or I forget what the other one is called.  The activity many writers sign up to see how fast they can get a novel done.  Can one get a novel done in a month? Can you write your novel in a week?  That’s pushing oneself to the limits of a human being being able to complete those many words in a very short time frame.  But, I guess it could be done.  People have surprised their editors at how fast they can write something. Alas, we can’t all be James Pattersons and write and publish all those novels in a year’s time, but you never know really.  I think it is how bad one wants something or how much someone wants to push their own limits to get something like that finished. What works for one author, will most likely not be the same for the other author.  It probably has a big factor of what each author brings to their tables and what one feels is completed. Some writers take even ten years or more to finish a novel.  I believe if I remember right, it takes Joyce Carol Oates longer to finish her novels.  Every author has their own perception for when their writing feels finished and whole. Just as a fine art masterpiece needs to work as a whole to be complete, so does the finished novel. True, you may want to see if you have it in you to finish a novel within a week or a month, but that does not actually call it done.  Which brings me to the whole editing process. Many of us authors want to make sure we have a very refined piece of writing before we can even attempt to call it complete.  We rework things until we’re blue in the head as we want the finished novel to be absolutely flawless. Every author will also tell you that no book ever written is completely perfect.  That is what keeps an author to keep writing new novels as we want to see if the next one will be even better than the first one. A novel is truly done when you can go through it many times, read it all over again, fix what you want to fix, fix it again and again until you believe it has arrived at the place where you feel it is finally ready for publishing. Every author arrives at this point at a different time frame.  Some can call it down within a matter of months while others take years to finish something they started.  I guess it depends on their work habits as well and what they believe is a great novel. Any great novel has to be able to read smoothly through the whole thing.  All the characters and their actions have to be absolutely convincing to make the readers want to buy the book and to be able to keep flipping the pages. That’s what you, the author has to set out to do when writing your masterpiece.  Make it great.  Keep it interesting.  And above all make your readers want to see the heroine and the hero all the way through.  And to have them be really happy when the bad guy or bad girl gets her just desserts.
Jennifer Jo Fay Copyrighted June 5, 2013