To a layman, editing usually means reading something over and catching a few typos. But for more serious writers, be they fiction, educational, technical or non-fiction, know that sometimes editing means taking the whole thing apart, moving things around, hacking parts out entirely and totally rebuilding whole sections.

You can find yourself looking at a part that just doesn’t work and, like a mad scientist, cracking your knuckles and claiming, “We can rebuild it!” as lightning cracks in the background. But taking out your editing scalpel is itself an act of blind faith. Will you really improve your creation with your tinkering or will you end up with a horrifying mess of a creature, something that people run screaming from like old Square-Head Bolts-in-Neck? Sometimes you hack the whole story apart only to realize you’ve made it worse.

In my current work in progress, there is a scene that doesn’t seem much at first glance. It’s a relatively calm passage compared to the rest of the action but it has a very important role of setting up everything to follow. In this scene, my main character gets 3 pieces of bad news. Would it be better, I realized while editing, if she got each piece of bad news separately instead? It would make each set-back more powerful and dramatic. So I’d make the events of that one scene play out over several scenes instead.

I liked this idea, even though it would mean a lot of rewriting work. Never one to shy away from the editing by weed hacker method, I started hacking the whole section apart and then rewrote it completely. It’s better in a ton of ways. Tighter. More dramatic. There’s just one problem.

I left out something huge and important. Like, very plot necessary. It’s like I took apart the skeleton to see how the bones looked as a different animal and, when I stepped back, I tripped over the bones I had left over and ended up flat on my butt. Crud, this skull has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?

So I have to rewrite what I rewrote to figure out how to fit the important bits back in. But I only ended up in this situation because I forgot to follow my own golden rules for editing and rewriting. Let me share them with you so you don’t end up in the same boat as I did.

Hillary’s Tips for Rewriting and Rearranging
Take notes. Before taking apart what you have, carefully analyze what’s already on the page. Don’t just think about this, physically take notes on each of the following:

• What is good about it? What parts do you want to recycle and work into the new version?
• What doesn’t work? What parts can you change or leave out in the new version?
• What function does each part of the original play in the story as a whole? What elements of the original are vital to the book? How will the new version fill these same needs?

Take this list of elements and write it out as a checklist. Then when you write the new version, you can refer back to your list and make sure the new section does what it needs to in the story as a whole. It’s easy to forget the big picture when you start to rewrite so this makes sure to keep you on track.

Talk it out. Find a friend, beta reader, family member, anyone who is willing to sit and listen to you for a while (preferably someone who didn’t know the first version). Physically talk the new version of the story out. Not only does this force you (the writer) to notice any issues with the new version, it gives you an outside perspective to ask the obvious questions you may have overlooked. (Wait, didn’t that guy she’s kissing die three chapters ago?) While you can try to just dive in and write this out, physically talking it out first can help you catch most of the big issues before you take the time to put pen to paper.

Keep the original draft somewhere. I have a whole folder in Google Docs that is just the original versions of things I cut or rewrote and I am always mining that for both rewrites and other stories. If you find the new version doesn’t work, you can refer back to the original to see what elements you overlooked or may still need. No matter how horrible you think the original is, any satisfaction you get from deleting it will be gone if you realize later there was something out of it you needed. You may never look at that draft again but Murphy’s Law promises that if you don’t keep it, you’ll need it again later.

Be flexible. This may seem obvious. After all, you just decided to take apart a whole section of your book and rearrange it. But I like to think of editing as one of those Magic Eye 3D pictures. If you are willing to really step back and look at the whole thing, sometimes everything rearranges itself in front of your eyes to something totally unlike the original. Once you start rearranging, if you realize your beloved opening should really come later in the book or if you realize that maybe your MC should lose his job *before* his girlfriend dumps, be open to it. I’m not saying you should hack everything up for the sake of hacking it up, but if the bones of your story are good, they shouldn’t suffer for a little rearranging. (Writing is *nothing* like archeology. ;-)) Index cards are your friend. But just because events in your story have “always” happened in a certain order, doesn’t mean you should play around with a different sequence of events. Even if the original way is better, you’ll have a better idea of why that is and a greater understanding of your story together.

What other editing and rewriting tips have worked for you? Please share them with us below.