Rewriting a novel is painful, folks. It is an absolute slog, a war between the limits of time, talents, and perfection. Today, I am three weeks into my rewrite and I’ve managed to produce just thirty-five typewritten pages of material, which I suppose isn’t terrible once I account for seven lost days during the course of the holidays. If I whittle it down to two weeks of work, though, it amounts to a bit more than seventeen pages per week – less than three pages daily. Should I keep such a pace, I won’t be done with the rewrite until early April at best, and frankly, I’m not sure I have the energy make it that long.
What takes so much time, you might ask? Why is the rewrite so different from the first draft? I’m not just checking the material for typos and grammatical errors, but rather rewriting the book in a very literal sense. Using the first draft merely as a guide and somewhat as an organizer, I am rewriting, restructuring, reordering, adding to, and subtracting from every single paragraph in the document. Every scene has to have meaning and has to gel with the whole, justify the ending, add to the story or out the window it goes, no matter how much I enjoyed the scene on its own merits. This makes sense when a person is writing fiction; I’m working with mostly non-fiction, however, and so my challenge is to balance this fierce drive for unification with the need for authenticity – the story has to remain largely intact whether it makes sense or not.
Add to my challenge the rewarding but difficult task of trying to envision what a generally closed, long dead character might have been thinking seventy years ago. My book is not a war book, though it happens during a war and because of it. My book is a story of character and hopes and dreams and realities – a story I am hardly capable of fully imagining given the limits of my own personal experience and depth. And so, I have to rely on the ever-elusive will of the Universe – the muse that guides artists of all kinds. And she happens to be fairly fickle.
Progress may be slow but it’s steady, at least. Once in a while, I even produce something I don’t hate. Check this out:
This wasn’t the first time I felt cheated by life, and it wouldn’t be the last. Perhaps a sense of unjust deprivation is inherited, as a gene, from father to son or mother to daughter, marking a family in the way that a nose does, or a forehead, for Dad certainly endured no shortage of such trials. Even as a child, I bore witness to multiple occasions on which opportunities, advantages, and luck gave out on him before his will was fully spent.
After we lost the White House, Dad moved us to the Jacob Place and then twice more before giving up on Declo forever. The beginning of the Great Depression lurked everywhere but no one could see it, least of all a man like my father. He would attribute our hard times to luck, curse his lack of it, and swear that it would change sooner or later. It had to. If luck can run out, he reasoned, so could unluck. And his was poised to expire any old day.
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