Redrafting: How Much or How Little

They say that rewriting is harder than writing.  I say that this is an understatement.

In fact, in general I just prefer not to do it.  If there was a way I thought this could be done better, I would have done it that way in the first place.  Right?

Except that that is nonsense.  Just an excuse for me not to have to do the hard work.  Taking a step back and reading through your material can show something to be very different from what you thought you had written.

Parts that took you hours and hours (and, indeed, days) to write, take up only a tiny space on the page.  And that section that you zipped through in an afternoon turns out to be as lengthy a portion as that which you agonized over for weeks.  You thought you had written one thing, but upon reading the result you discover that it is something else entirely.

Thankfully my first installment of "Dr. Jeremiah" looks to be more or less as I had intended it to be, but still a lot of rewriting lies ahead.  Besides the constant polishing (honestly, I could tinker with the wording of my prose for the rest of eternity and still not consider it to be finished) I know there are things that need to be "punched up".  Details I glossed over, characters who all sound alike, you know the kind of thing.  But (despite my antipathy towards the process) this is easy stuff.

How much more difficult it is when what you've written isn't working.  When what seemed just right in outline form takes a very different shape on the eventual page.  Facing the prospect of almost completely reworking from scratch massive segments of your work is daunting to the point of wanting to scrap it in its entirety and start again.  (Sometimes, indeed, this is just best.)

Always on completing a piece of writing (besides the endless tinkering with phraseology) I want to just consider it done and put it out there into the world.  I like to pretend that all of that writing I just went through was "the hard part".  When I know better,  I know that the real work is just beginning.

And I never was all that fond of work.