Rewriting, huh? Sigh…
It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post, and rewriting is the main reason for that cause. I can’t say it’s the only reason because that’d be a lie; another cause is my lack of ideas to talk about here. But I hope to write more in the next weeks.
Now, going to the point of this post: rewriting web novels.
Why would I ever want to do something like that? Well, it varies on every writer. I’ve seen that a common problem that leads to that decision is not liking where the story is going, and probably the plot is too far ahead to simply delete a couple of chapters and tell the readers to forget about them. But there are a lot of problems.
The most notorious problem is that readers will be pissed—and with reason. No one likes to be told what they read is going to be scrapped and they should re-read everything, but with changes. And that’s exactly what I did.
I took the difficult decision to rewrite Xenon two months ago. It wasn’t because I didn’t like the plot—completely the opposite, I loved it—it was because my eyes were opened; writing was a lot more than I ever could think of.
As of that moment, I’ve already rewritten the first chapters with what I thought was a better writing—it wasn’t—and just updated the existing novel. I was happy with that, but I soon realized how wrong I was.
I spent one month learning how to write. It was far deeper than I expected and I could finally see a lot of things I didn’t pay attention before. I was writing thinking of writing and not just on the story—which I did for seven months.
The decision came after I saw how much I had to change. Maybe the plot was pretty much the same, but the structure, reasoning, and constructiong wasn’t. I couldn’t just update the existing chapters, this now was a proper rewrite, so I had to go with re-publishing the novel.
So, my conclusion is that rewriting is a double-edged sword. I was doubtful at first, there were a few ways to do it. But I took the decision because I thought it was the way to go.
I also realized why planning in advance is very important; doing it will stop you from falling into a plot you don’t like. But maybe planning or outlining isn’t always an option, so there’s writing many chapters before publishing—practically ending the novel.
As I don’t have much more to talk about, I’ll be blogging my opinions on different things like animes, games, and whatever I want to talk about. Thank you for reading!
