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Revise, Rewrite, Redraft - what's the difference?

oenanthe

Minstrel
spinoff from another thread.

Could you do me a favor? please define

Revision
Rewriting
Redrafting

And how often you do these things?
 

Heliotrope

Staff
Article Team
Hey fellow Canadian :)

I think it's different for everyone, really. My personal definitions are:

Revision, for me, is an umbrella term for "rewriting/redrafting"... as in "This story needs some serious revision."

Now, the other two are different for me.

Rewriting: This is when I want to throw out an entire chunk of the story and start fresh. I'm doing this right now with my WIP. I sort of wrote myself into a bit of a corner, and the best way to solve some problems is to back out the way I came and take a different route. This means that the last two chapters of my WIP are garbage. I'm going back two chapters and starting fresh from there. So, rewriting.

Redrafting: Is when I like the core of what I have... the action sequence is decent, the way the parts are moving around the stage is decent... but it needs some serious work as far as character development, fleshed out setting, etc. So I'm not cutting the scene completely and starting over, I'm working with what I have to create something more usable, with more impact.

As far as when do I use them? That is interesting... drafting for me is a pendulum process. I never start at the beginning and work my way through from a to z.

I may write four or five chapters then reach a stumbling block. The only way to solve the stumbling block is to add something or change something a few chapters back. So I go back to the necessary chapter and "redraft" or "rewrite" as needed to jump the hurdle. Then I continue on until I get to the next hurdle. I keep doing this, back and forth, back and forth, until I end up with the semblance of a cohesive unit.
 
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Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
Personally, I don't use the word redraft. I would use rewrite for ditching and replacing and revising for the far more common little changes.

And... I haven't rewritten anything in years. The only large chunks I've ditched have been to eliminate story lines that just aren't working or because they'd add too much length.

I will "rewrite" some of my older stuff, if I get around to it, because my prose has changed a bunch, but that isn't exactly a pure rewrite either. Heavy revision, perhaps, LOL.

But hey, the terms don't really matter.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
It doesn't matter, imo, except when working with an editor or agent. In which case, the editor or agent will define the terms for you and you'd best follow their definition!

When in casual conversation I'm, well, casual in how I use these terms.
 

Insolent Lad

Maester
I just call it all rewriting. Or revision. I'm constantly doing it because I follow a non-linear Nabokov-like approach to writing, bringing the whole thing into focus at once, rather than starting at the beginning and working my way through. That is separate from 'editing' of course.
 

oenanthe

Minstrel
Okay! Interesting responses.

revising: After writing a hot mess of a draft, I analyse it. I examine arc, plot, adherence to theme, character, dialogue, pacing, and description. I evaluate every scene in the story to make sure it's pulling its weight. I litter the page with comments. I double check my book's "bible" to track characters and scene locations. I sketch out the reveals, the escalations, the plot turning points. when I'm done, the MS looks like it's been in a war and documents bleed yellow. Then I make a task list of everything I need to do in the story, work out a schedule for changes, and get to work.

Every single one of my stories gets a revision. actually, at least two revisions. revising an 80k draft usually takes me about a month.

re-drafting: chucking out an early draft to start all over again from page one. very little if any reference to the draft that came before.

I only do this if i've written less than I could manage in a couple of weeks - call it 20k - and I know that i'm doing something major that demands I scrap it and start over.

re-writing: I'm telling the same story, but I have to change the POV or the tense, or something that means that I really do have to look at every single sentence in the story and change it.

I don't think I've ever done this, but something that I do in the final stages of editing is quite similar. I have a wide monitor, wide enough to display two MS word documents side by side, or to have a page-wide split screen in Scrivener. The left side is my draft, revised, with one or two editing passes. The right side is a blank page. I transcribe the story on the left onto the page on the right, from the top to the bottom. it takes about two weeks for me to do this to an 80k novel, so I make a lot of tea. This is the second to last step i take in polishing. The last step is reading the book out loud to do adjustments that sound good.

And then it's probably ready.
 
C

Chessie

Guest
Revise: fix spelling & grammatical errors, clarify clunky sentences, make the prose more readable (replacing double-used words, etc). Smoothing out the narrative so it's more emotional and has more rhythm.

Re-draft: start fresh with an idea that I've already written, but throw out the old manuscript.

Re-write: Hell no. Never.
 
Very interesting how the terms might be used differently but the essential processes are the same regardless of the terms used for them.

To the degree that I've used the terms, I've used them in a way similar to the way Helio uses them. But after reading Oenanthe's post, I see how that breakdown makes much sense also!

The processes themselves are basically the same. The distinction between processes rests on what is kept and what is tossed, and also to some degree on how much is kept and how much is tossed.

Seems to me the distinction between editing processes revolves around changing elements of the story, in the broadest sense, vs changing elements already included in the draft?

The fight scene, the romantic subplot, the plot points—these things that have already been put into the draft are great, but how they are written doesn't quite work. So maybe we revise them. Or rewrite/redraft them (depending on who is using the terms.) Maybe we add other elements that will support or improve what we already have, alter a POV, etc.

The fight scene, the romantic subplot, the plot points—not working at all. Nothing we can add to them will fix them. No other set of words or order of words will help them. Chuck them. Start over.

As far as the terms go, I think how we understand the prefix and root of the word makes a difference in which term we choose.
 
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Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
As others have said . . .

Revise = Lots of smaller changes throughout, focused on things like language and tension

Redraft = Big changes throughout - cuts, additions, sections might get rewritten, the end result looks very different but is still recognizable as the same text

Rewrite = Toss the old and start with a more or less blank page

Overall it's a pecking order for how serious the changes are. But as others have said, in practice they're more or less interchangeable. Aside from the different definitions people have given, somebody might call it a revision or a rewrite based solely on how grumpy they feel about having to make the changes.
 
If I make any significant changes to a manuscript, then the modified manuscript is a revision of the original. If I start over with a blank file, whether I perform any copy and paste operations, then I'm rewriting. If I ditch the story completely and create a new outline for a similar story, if the story is similar enough to the ditched one, then I might consider it redrafting, though redraft is not a term I generally use. I'd probably think of redrafting as rewriting if the stories were that similar.
 
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