AQATWW: The Hardest Rewrite, or the Roughest Draft?
After taking some time off and stewing on feedback, I've resumed work on the rewrite.
I'm not deep into it yet - I am still in the process of moving across the country. So far the rewriting has mostly consisted of another editing pass.
I am really struggling with how much rewriting to do.
I've been involved in a lot of writing groups, besides my fan fiction beta-readers. Just as critiquing is an art, so is receiving critiques. Obviously there's no point in having people critique your writing if you're going to ignore what they say. And my beta-readers are hand-selected fans of AQ whom I chose for their insight and deep knowledge of the series. So when some of the critiques landed like a punch to the face, I had to spend a lot of time thinking them over.
The flip side of receiving critiques is that you cannot and should not try to make every change that a particular reader wants.
A good rule of thumb is that if a lot of people comment on the same issue, it's a writing issue, and if one person comments on it, it's a reader issue. In this case, though, I had some comments that were very much "This reader really didn't like this" and others that were split between "these readers liked this" and "these readers hated it."
To all the people who've DMed me begging me to trust my gut and not let my beta-readers persuade me to change the story in ways I don't want to, I can assure you that the things happening the way I want them to happen are still going to happen, even though I know there will be people who hate it.
A lot of the tough calls are plot-related. "This doesn't make sense to me" or "There should be a more elegant solution to this" or "Not enough foreshadowing" or "The structure of the entire novel would work better if you moved an entire arc around."
These are often true statements, but moving things around will trigger a cascade of rewrites. I think I have plotted this book so tightly (not in terms of leanness - it's definitely not lean! - but in terms of everything being connected) that it's going to be very hard to move or remove entire chapters, without, you know, rewriting half the book. And to be perfectly honest, most of it looks, to me, salvageable with some polish, not "OMG this needs to be chainsawed and remodeled." I have never really had this problem before where I cannot step back as an author and decide whether I'm just too reluctant to kill my darlings (or too lazy to rewrite 100K words) or if my instincts are good and I just need to accept that half my readers are going to fire me after this.
I want to be clear this is not a complaint about my betas or the valuable service they have done for me. Just as I cannot fault anyone who dislikes the finished product, I cannot fault any early reader who has a very different vision and set of expectations than I do.
I should also add that the feedback wasn't all negative! There was lots of positive feedback.
But "This is the best-written AQ story yet" + "I almost quit reading" has been difficult to work through.
I'm not deep into it yet - I am still in the process of moving across the country. So far the rewriting has mostly consisted of another editing pass.
I am really struggling with how much rewriting to do.
I've been involved in a lot of writing groups, besides my fan fiction beta-readers. Just as critiquing is an art, so is receiving critiques. Obviously there's no point in having people critique your writing if you're going to ignore what they say. And my beta-readers are hand-selected fans of AQ whom I chose for their insight and deep knowledge of the series. So when some of the critiques landed like a punch to the face, I had to spend a lot of time thinking them over.
The flip side of receiving critiques is that you cannot and should not try to make every change that a particular reader wants.
A good rule of thumb is that if a lot of people comment on the same issue, it's a writing issue, and if one person comments on it, it's a reader issue. In this case, though, I had some comments that were very much "This reader really didn't like this" and others that were split between "these readers liked this" and "these readers hated it."
To all the people who've DMed me begging me to trust my gut and not let my beta-readers persuade me to change the story in ways I don't want to, I can assure you that the things happening the way I want them to happen are still going to happen, even though I know there will be people who hate it.
A lot of the tough calls are plot-related. "This doesn't make sense to me" or "There should be a more elegant solution to this" or "Not enough foreshadowing" or "The structure of the entire novel would work better if you moved an entire arc around."
These are often true statements, but moving things around will trigger a cascade of rewrites. I think I have plotted this book so tightly (not in terms of leanness - it's definitely not lean! - but in terms of everything being connected) that it's going to be very hard to move or remove entire chapters, without, you know, rewriting half the book. And to be perfectly honest, most of it looks, to me, salvageable with some polish, not "OMG this needs to be chainsawed and remodeled." I have never really had this problem before where I cannot step back as an author and decide whether I'm just too reluctant to kill my darlings (or too lazy to rewrite 100K words) or if my instincts are good and I just need to accept that half my readers are going to fire me after this.
I want to be clear this is not a complaint about my betas or the valuable service they have done for me. Just as I cannot fault anyone who dislikes the finished product, I cannot fault any early reader who has a very different vision and set of expectations than I do.
I should also add that the feedback wasn't all negative! There was lots of positive feedback.
But "This is the best-written AQ story yet" + "I almost quit reading" has been difficult to work through.