New strategy for rewrites.

I've come up with a new theory for rewrites.

For me, one of the most important things is for a book is to stay fresh.  What works for me is to write a quick first draft, feeling it, not worrying about being polished, but trying the get the macro problems right; plot and story, characters and theme, emotion and catharsis.

I tend to be a little sketchy when I write this way.  My second draft are always bigger than my first drafts.  I tend to go back and put in more description, more telling details.

I also need to polish the words.  These are more like micro problems.

So one of my problems with rewriting is that I tend to go over the whole book, beginning to end, and then do it again and again.

Imagine reading the same book 10 times in a row, and you'll get a sense of what happens.  The story becomes nonsense, the words a jumble.

Eventually, if I work on a book long and hard enough, this always happens.  The irony being, in trying to make the book more readable for the reader, I've made it less readable to me.

So, like I say, I try to hold this off this singularity event for as long as possible.

When I write the first draft, I'm concerned with the overall story.  By the time I write the third or fourth draft, I'm focused on individual scenes, then paragraphs, then sentences, then words.  It gets more and more micro, the more polished it is.

With Nearly Human, I put the numbers of the chapters in a hat and worked on the randomly and that seemed to work.  I've been thinking theoretically, that when I begin focusing on sentences and paragraphs, I could almost do it backwards!  I may actually try that.

I wish I liked rewriting more -- but none of the macro matters if I don't get the micro right -- and vice versa.