Rework an Unfinished Project or Start Fresh?

Often as a writer you’re confronted with a choice between reworking a previous project that you set aside before completion, or starting from scratch with a new project. How do you decide which one to work on, particularly if your time is limited?

Part of that choice depends on how much effort you’ve put into the unfinished project. If you’ve devoted years of research into the historical background for a piece, and if you’ve already substantially drafted the work, I can see the rationale for not giving up on that project.

But to me the most important factor is whether the characters are speaking in your thoughts. A writer should be like Joan of Arc, hearing voices. 

Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ultimately, you listen to the conversations and arguments that your characters are having in your thoughts, as odd as that may sound. A piece of writing is alive if you can hear the characters speaking and see them doing things. If that isn’t happening, no amount of research, background, or planning can rescue a piece of creative writing.

I would suggest not getting fixated on securing a return on investment for a previous project, unless that project is alive and talking. In fact, you might complete a new project that is vital and active more quickly than trying to resuscitate a work that you no longer have a feel for, even if it is partially complete or researched.

Not all literary projects get finished, even if you devote years to them. Even if you finish a manuscript, it sometimes doesn’t turn out the way you hoped, and it can’t be sent to an editor or a producer, or it doesn’t get the response you’d wished for. In those cases, the best thing to do is to cut your losses, and start with a new project.

The good news is, ideas for literary projects are not numbered. They’re like waves: there’s always a new one arriving on shore. Not all waves are perfect, but there isn’t a limit on how many occur in your lifetime.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Is There Still Such a Thing as a "Draft" of a Piece of Writing?

I would call a “draft” of a literary work any version that is finished in a preliminary way. Usually, writers create multiple drafts of a work before they consider it finished.

But do “drafts” still exist in the digital age, when new versions are rarely printed out? For longer works, certainly. For a work such as a novel or a book of nonfiction, a draft can take years to create or revise. A novelist or nonfiction writer may spend a year or two writing the first draft, ask for comments from writer friends, work on a second draft for a year more, send the text to an agent, and spend months working on a third draft that incorporates the agent’s comments. That is a fairly typical writing process for full-length prose works.

But for shorter works, such as poems, short stories, or blogs, drafts have almost ceased to exist in the digital age. The concept of a draft dates back to the pre-digital era, when you had to write or type everything by hand, and every draft existed on a separate sheet or sheets of paper. But even in those bad old days, each draft had notes that were scrawled in the margins or between lines, Inserts A and B added on extra pages, etc. So one “draft” was in reality many drafts.

For shorter works, such as a poem or a blog, every time you open a file, make a change, and hit Save, you’ve created a new draft. There is rarely such a thing as a draft anymore in the old sense of a newly printed or handwritten copy. Or rather, every version, even a digitally printed version, is actually a draft, since it so easy to change text even once it has been published, if it’s online.

What does this mean for writers of short works, that there are no longer drafts, or that works are perpetually in progress? On the one hand, it gives a writer a sense of freedom that s/he can make changes so easily. It’s as if a sculptor could work in magical clay that’s perpetually wet and never dries until you want it to. There’s much greater fluidity and flexibility now for writers, and that situation is highly conducive to creativity, which usually requires experimentation.

On the other hand, with text being so fluid, there is little incentive to polish writing to perfection. Rarely is a version considered final. There’s also not the same sense of progressive steps in the writing process. There is no longer physical evidence of the various stages that a work has undergone, the way there used to be a paper trail of all the drafts of a poem, for example.

Is it a good thing that writers now work in a much more fluid medium, where it’s easier to make changes, but more difficult to see a work as final, as finished? I’m not sure it’s better, but it certainly is a different process for writers of short works. In a way those changes mirror what has happened in the realm of relationships—there is much more fluidity now in relationships than there has been in recent centuries, but there is less of a sense of each stage of courtship, with the progression of steps leading to a final resolution.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop, Part 7: What to Do Afterwards

OK, your workshop is over, and you want to revise the piece that you brought to the group. Where do you begin? I think every writer handles this differently, but I can tell you the process I go through after a workshop, in the hope that it might be helpful to you.

First of all, I write down every single comment I get in a workshop that might possibly be of use, and mark it with the name or initials of the person who made the suggestion. That helps me sort through which comments are applicable to the particular work I’m revising. As I mentioned in a previous blog, you have to know the taste, preferences, and biases of your workshop members to absorb their comments most usefully.

Second, I wait one to three months before I look at the comments I’ve written down. Sometimes after a workshop I’m reeling from all the information I’ve assimilated in just a few minutes. I work on a piece for months, maybe years and when I finally show it to my writing group, and I hear all sorts of suggestions in the space of only a few minutes. Many of the ideas I didn’t anticipate at all, and one or two might take this piece of writing in a very different direction.

Even though I usually wait a couple of months to sort out all the information, if there’s something that was pointed out that I know is flat-out wrong, such as a misspelling or a dangling modifier, I usually fix that immediately.

To begin the revisions, I wait for a moment when I have no distractions and a stretch of time with nothing to do in front of me. Revision is a process that requires a lot of concentration. If it involves a poem, I try to allow an hour for the first round of edits after the workshop.

I start by carefully reading every single comment, sometimes recalling the tone of the person making the suggestion, and sometimes I remember my own reaction at the time I received the comment. I include those recollections in gauging how much weight to give to a suggestion. There are also certain comments I may have starred with an asterisk or underlined during the workshop, because the comments felt particularly useful. Those are usually the ones I begin with when I make my edits.

There are sometimes comments that would take my work in a completely different direction. Those are the ones I weigh most deliberately. Often those comments seem to me to be about a different work from the one I brought to the workshop—that wasn’t what I was trying to do, I’m not sure why that person interjected an idea that has nothing to do with the impulse behind this work of mine. Maybe it was a random idea. I discard that suggestion.

But every once in a while, a comment that takes a work of mine in a significantly different direction seems like the best one to me. A member of my workshop has given me a huge gift, a way to rework a problematic piece that otherwise might never gel into a work I’d like to an audience or try to publish. After weighing the alternatives, I rework the whole piece to incorporate that comment.

Just the process of sorting through the comments almost always stimulates other ideas that help me revise the piece in ways that the comments didn’t even suggest. Those fresh thoughts can be really useful in revisions.

One important thing to keep in mind is that a work of literature is a living organism. If you change one thing, you almost always have to change something else to restore the balance. For instance, you might add a line or a sentence that includes a word that you repeat just below the new edit, in which case you might have to find a replacement for that word when you use it for the second time. But this principle can also exist on a larger scale, in the plot of a novel, for instance. You might add a scene at the beginning that then requires adjustments several chapters later, to make the action consistent. Until you get to the very last round of edits, it’s almost impossible to make one change without making another tweak somewhere else. But that's a good thing. It means that your piece of writing is alive, that it is reacting to the work you are doing in revising it.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

How to Get Published
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer