Your Baby’s Born in the Rough Draft. You raise it in the Rewrite.
“Murder your Darlings.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writing is easy. Really. It’s just tap tap tapping on the keyboard, or scribbling your thoughts inside a notebook, as the ideas rain around you.
At first, the random shavings of thought don’t have to make a whole lot of sense, as long as you’re getting them down. It’s the rewriting that’s really difficult.
That’s when you must murder your darlings.
It’s in the rewrite when you have to stare at your work, and get your self love and self hate to hold hands and play a bit of hopscotch. That’s when you have to decide what’s important and what needs to be dragged to the trash and wiped from the hard drive.
Right now, I’m crawling my way through a rather tedious section of the novel. It goes on and on and on some more while doing absolutely nothing to drive the story. Back in the first draft (when I had no idea where I was going, or even why I was writing) I fell in love with this middle class family.
Apparently, I also fell in love with every single movement of their day.
I especially liked this section that followed the family along as they did some shopping on the day after Christmas. Apparently, I liked it so much, I proceeded to vomit my affection all over the keyboard.
They wake up, they go shopping, they go to lunch, then they drive around for a while before finally going back home, having themselves a fashion show with their new purchases, and eating dinner. Nothing relevant happens until dinner, and if that sounds boring… well, then thanks for believing in me. The actual text reads with the amount of excitement normally found in a chess game played by mail.
Now, imagine that scene stretched to three-thousand words, and you’ll get an idea what the chapter’s like.
The funny part is, I loved the chapter before I wrote it. I loved it in my head before I fell to sleep, and I loved it the next day in black and white. But I am loathing it something fierce in the rewrite.
I read it over yesterday.
Twice.
Normally, I like to steal a glance at myself whenever I’m passing a mirror. Not yesterday, I was too ashamed.
Thirty pages and nothing happens that’s necessary for the reader to know. That’s like promising to take your kids to Disneyland but telling them you have to drive through Arizona first.
Get to the point, Writer Dad.
Okay.
The section now reads: ”They went to lunch. Later, at dinner…”
Much better, right?
Writer Dad
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Hi, I'm Sean Platt - author, father, and Creative Director at Rev Media Marketing. Writer Dad is my life as it unfolds. This chapter of my journey began two years back when I 




