Rewrite the worlds

[butterflydreaming]

A week or so ago, Brain Pickings (the newsletter) had a quote from Ernest Hemingway, on writing, in which he stated this method: write until something interesting is starting to happen, then the next day, start writing again from the beginning. Rinse, repeat. I've been thinking about that ever since.

Putting aside that he may very well have been intending to scare off wannabe writers who won't put in the work, these are the thoughts I've had: 1) what would that do to the way the story was told, and 2) could I do that? (I don't mean, rewrite sections, but rewrite from the beginning each day.)

What comes to mind is That Guy, the one who tells the no-shit-there-i-was big fish story that gets honed in the retelling. That Guy has learned what gets the reaction, the laugh or the rolled eyes. He knows the story so well that he can tell it inebriated and still hit the timing. That will be the guy who gets asked, "tell about that time you..."

After a week of thinking about what "can I do this?" means, I have decided that a "day" would have to mean a creation day, because I top out at 2K, with 500 words being more typical, on a chronological day. I'd never finish anything but flash.

Retelling familiarity, I think, is why some things are easier to write than others. At least for me, it can't be only visual. I have to hear the words in my head. The first 20K of Stadium were like trying to write in a foreign language. Pulling them out was literally that, and it didn't matter how well I could see the narrative in my head. The mental version has a soundtrack. It has the storyboarding of Production IG and Guillermo Del Torro colors. The written version is made of stiff cardboard, cut out of shipping boxes, scribbled with crayon in the later passes.

I know this story, but I don't know quite how it sounds, yet.

Comments

[t_hale_capital]

That's really interesting, I never heard about that method before. The example of the guy with the fish story makes a lot of sense to me though. Every time the story gets told, it gets refined & distilled down to its essential core.

On a related note, in the process of revising my current novel, I'm typing in every word again, well of course the parts that are changed, but even the parts that could be cut'n'pasted verbatim. So hmm... maybe I am sorta doing that method... although not starting every day from the beginning of course.

[igenlode]

in the process of revising my current novel, I'm typing in every word again, well of course the parts that are changed, but even the parts that could be cut'n'pasted verbatim

I think that's a really good way of doing it; it stops you being lazy about revisions (because, basically, it's no more work to type up a slightly tweaked version than it is to blankly repeat whatever you originally wrote) and forces you to think about what you've written as a whole while you're going along, rather than focusing in on perceived problem spots.

[igenlode]

The mental version has a soundtrack. It has the storyboarding of Production IG and Guillermo Del Toro colors. The written version is made of stiff cardboard, cut out of shipping boxes, scribbled with crayon in the later passes.

How well I know that feeling :-)

It sounds to me as if what Hemingway is talking about is the process of 'writing oneself in', i.e. writing any old rubbish until you get something worthwhile and the work starts to flow, on the assumption that you can always edit out/throw away the bad bits later on. It's supposed to be a way over writer's block, and certainly I find that getting a passage started is often the hardest part. (I don't normally throw away work: I just go very, very, very slowly, constructing endless sentence fragments in my head, sometimes putting a few of them down on paper and almost immediately crossing them out. Sometimes I do look back at it the next day and just scribble the whole paragraph out and go in a different direction, though.)


The idea of retelling and 'rewriting familiarity' is interesting from my point of view, because this is my experience -- due to historical accident, this is the way I've almost always worked. Tell the story once (without writing anything down), then write it a second time with foreknowledge of which parts lead into which and which snippets of dialogue are significant, i.e. all the Really Memorable Parts.

But unlike the Guy with the Fish, I find there are diminishing returns to be had: the second telling is invariably better than the first (because it has all the highlights of the original make-it-up-as-you-go-along story with a retrospective structure imposed on it and a lot of extra incidental detail added), but subsequent retellings dimish in zest and enjoyment.

As for literally rewriting from the beginning each day... ouch. (At the risk of sounding like the Four Yorkshiremen, 500 words is my target for a good day!)