Why a Page One Rewrite Is Actually Worth Celebrating

It sounds scary, but it’s actually MAJOR editing progress.

What if the best way to make progress on your novel . . .

. . . is to go back to the beginning?

Sometimes, the most effective editing strategy is a page one rewrite.

Yes, that means exactly what it sounds like. You open a blank document and begin writing an entirely fresh manuscript.

It might feel like you’re moving backwards. But you’re not. And in this episode, I’m going to prove it to you.

You’ll learn:

• Why I CELEBRATE when a writer starts a page one rewrite (and why you should too!)
• Why going back to the beginning is an unavoidable part of the editing process
• 2 tips to help you make the most of a page one rewrite
• Why your previous draft isn’t wasted (even if you’re starting fresh with a blank page!)
• And more!

If a page one rewrite is your best next step, consider this episode your pep talk.

You’ve got this. And it’s going to be so, so worth it.

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Ep. 61: What It REALLY Means to Make Progress Editing Your Novel

Transcript

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I believe that a page one rewrite is such significant editing progress that it's worthy of celebration. It indicates that your vision is now so clear and you're taking such a significant step forward. That it is worthwhile to create space for that vision by opening up a blink documents. And rewriting the entire story. There's no loss or failure or shame there that's progress. That's success. Welcome to your next draft. In the last episode of the podcast, I talked about what it really looks like to make progress when you're editing a novel. And I used an analogy. The way that we like to imagine progress is linear. Like a road trip from New York to California. You start, you get on the road, you go straight there. It's a long journey, but it's pretty much a straight line. And then you get to your destination. But in reality, editing a novel is a lot more like you're climbing a spiral staircase. If you're looking at it from above, you just look like you're going around in circles over and over and over and staying pretty much in the same place the whole time. Doing the same thing, working on the same piece of text over and over and over. But if you look at it from the side, you'll see the truth that you're actually making progress, going upwards with every single cycle. I go into a lot more depth about that in the last episode, which I highly recommend that you go check out after you finished this one. It's going to be a great companion episode to this one. You can find it@alicesubtler.com slash 61. This week though, I want to talk about a specific kind of editing progress. That can be a little hard to embrace as progress. Which is why I think it deserves an entire episode all on its own. I want to talk about the page one rewrite. Let's start off with a definition of terms. Uh, page one rewrite is when you write a draft of your manuscript and then you read through your manuscript and you find a lot of structural problems to fix. You create a plan for all these changes that you're going to make in your next draft. And then as you're making this plan, you decide that actually this next draft is going to be really, really different from the draft that you currently have. There might be some lines or scenes or some elements that are going to be the same. But on the whole, it's a pretty significant change. You could open up your original draft of the manuscript and work hard at reshaping it to fit this new plan. But you decide that actually it will be easier and more effective to open a brand new document and start writing your next draft as a completely fresh manuscript. You're starting a page one rewrite where you write a completely new draft of your novel rather than making changes to your previous draft. I'll note here that while I'm describing the page one rewrite as though it is a step between draft one and draft two, it can actually happen at any point in the developmental editing process. It often does happen between early drafts because you just discover so much about your story when you're going from draft one to draft two. But another common time when writers choose to do a page, one rewrite is after receiving significant editorial feedback. A developmental editor can help you unearth major structural issues that you didn't see, even in a fourth or fifth or sixth draft. And in those cases, even though the writer is many drafts into the editing process, They might decide that a page one rewrite is the best way to incorporate that new vision. Now. You probably don't need me to tell you that this editing strategy is often met with resistance. You might even feel a visceral reaction in your body. I sort of, that sounds awful rejection of everything that I'm saying here. After all, you know how hard you worked to get your current draft down on paper? You know how much time and thought and energy and effort it took to write every single word. To suggest that those words, aren't the words that you'll end up using. That you won't be making changes to the existing manuscripts, but writing an entirely new manuscript all over again. That can make it feel like all of that time and energy and effort was wasted. If you're imagining your editing process as a linear journey, this feels like you drove from New York all the way to Colorado only to turn back around, Go all the way back to New York city and start over again. It feels like undoing your work, throwing away, everything you've achieved so far, erasing every word you've written. And that's incredibly defeating. That's a real bummer who wants their writing process to feel like that. Here's the thing though. Well, all of these feelings are very understandable. This isn't how I, as an editor, think about a page one rewrite. At all. Let me give you a different vision for a page one rewrite. Honestly. When writers tell me, they've decided to do a page one rewrite of their novel. I get really excited. I'm so happy for them. I celebrate that As one of the biggest steps forward they can make in their editing process. And here's why. Your developmental editing process is all about getting a clear vision for what your book is ultimately going to become, and then executing that vision on the page. This is why it's called developmental editing. You're developing your idea. And the developmental editing process can take a long time because it is really dang hard to get clarity around your vision. Some writers spend a lot of time planning their novels before they write their first drafts. They front load all of this discovery and vision casting into the planning process before they ever write a word. I'm currently studying a book coaching methodology created by book coach, extraordinary Jenny Nash. She developed a process called blueprint for a book to guide writers through all of this upfront discovery before they write. It's a really great process. And when she coaches her writers through the blueprint, she spends four to eight weeks helping them make sure that that blueprint is really, really solid. And they have a crystal clear vision for their story before they ever begin writing their manuscript. You don't have to do all of that work of vision casting upfront, although it does have a lot of benefits. Some writers do prefer to discover their stories as they write This is the world of pantsers who write by the seat of their pants through their first drafts to find out what their stories will be. Once pantsers have that draft in hand, they have material on the page. Then the even larger step begins. Figuring out their vision. Finding the vision for what all of that material can become. And sometimes whether they've pantsed or planned writers decide to make a major pivot in their novel, a few drafts in maybe they get significant feedback from an editor, or maybe they discover something really important about their story that they missed before, or maybe their reason for writing or their goal for the book changes. And then they have more discovery ahead of them to figure out what the vision will be for their next version of their book. No matter where you are in the developmental editing process, it's all about getting clarity about your vision so that you can execute that vision on the page. And the challenge of the developmental editing process is that once you have material on the page, It's easy to get attached to it. You can be attached to your existing material for a lot of reasons, but there are three reasons in particular that I want to highlight. First. Of course you're attached to it because you know how much work it was to get it down on the page. You're also attached to it because once you got it down on the page, you discovered some things that you really liked. You created a fun, new character. You wrote a clever plot twist. You crafted some witty banter worthy of Emily Henry. There are parts of this manuscript. You really love. And it's easy to lose the focus on your big picture vision. And instead, start trying to enhance these great parts. But there's one more way in which you're attached to your existing material. And this one is the most insidious and the thing that makes a page one rewrite so powerful. The thing is once you have material on the page, your imagination for your story narrows. When you're looking at something that already exists. What you see is what's already there and the ways you can adjust it. The little tweaks this way or that to make it stronger. That's great. If the words that are already on the page are in line with your vision. But if they're not. They're actually trapping you, limiting your imagination from seeing all the possibilities before you. It's way, way more difficult to imagine something entirely new when you're focusing on what already exists. And this is why I love the page one rewrite because when you embrace the blank page, you create space for your vision to emerge. When writers tell me they are choosing to embark on a page. One rewrite I celebrate because what they're really telling me is that they are fully embracing unhooking themselves from what is so they can create space for what can be. These writers have clarity around their vision. So much clarity, in fact that they don't want to wrestle against a manuscript, that they know doesn't match that vision, and they don't want to risk losing that vision by directing their focus to the words they've already written and the ideas they've already tried. They have the kinds of clarity that they know will carry them through an entire manuscript. They can picture what that manuscript will be at the end. They honor the work they've done so far, the work that brought them to this point of clarity. And they have the courage to open fresh documents and begin a new manuscript. In fact, I want to pause there for a moment and talk about all that work that they've done so far. Remember in our road trip analogy, the page one rewrite means driving from New York to Colorado, and then turning around to undo all of your progress and go back to the beginning. But that's not really how editing works. If you picture editing like a spiral staircase, the page one rewrite is like completing one full revolution around that staircase. You've gone in an entire circle and you're standing directly over that first stair. The one that you began with down at the bottom. But now you're one floor or two floors or five floors higher up. You're not in the same place anymore. You're not actually starting over completely from scratch. You're climbing higher and higher and higher in your tower. Never going backwards, passing over your starting point again and again and again, but a level higher each time. In fact, my friend and fellow editor, Kim Kessler likes to say that there's no such thing as a page one rewrite, because you can never know less than you did when you started. You are never actually going back to the beginning. You're never seeing New York again. The reason why you're able to get the clarity about your vision that you need is precisely because of all the work that you did in your previous draft or the previous many drafts. We're not undoing anything or throwing any work away. In fact, we're building upon it and adding to it. It's just that the specific strategy that will most help you do that at this point. Is to open a blank documents and allow what you know about your story now to pour out onto the page, a fresh. If you're listening to this and thinking, you know, maybe a page one rewrite is what I need. And then I have two tips for you to help you make the most of your rewrite. The first tip is this. Before you embark on your page one rewrite, make sure that you do the work of clarifying your vision first. The page one rewrite is most powerful when you go into it, knowing exactly what you're trying to create next. So spend time, days, or even weeks working through your story development and clarifying your vision so that you know exactly what to write. Don't pet your way through this as another discovery draft, You already wrote the discovery draft and discovered your story. The page one, rewrite is your chance to execute your vision with intention. That means doing the work of developmental editing first. Make a seamless that reflects your current manuscript. Identify, what's not working in your story. Figure out what needs to change in order to solve those problems? And plan those changes on your seamless. I want you to walk into your page one, rewrite with intention and clarity, a solid plan in hand. You have earned that clear plan by doing the work of writing your previous drafts. Don't short change yourself. And the second sip is this. Just because you're starting your next draft from a blank page. Doesn't mean you have to burn everything you've already written. Make sure to save your previous drafts and a nice cozy file on your computer, where they can rest happily, knowing that they've done their jobs of bringing you to this point of clarity. After you finish your page one rewrite, you might decide that there are hidden gyms from your previous drafts that you want to bring into your latest manuscript. And since all your drafts are safely stored away, you'll be able to pull them back out and find exactly the pieces that you want to keep. The beauty of this is that it gives you all the spacious opportunity to create fresh material in your page, one rewrite. And then once you know what that new draft becomes. You can strategically pull in specific elements from your previous manuscripts. Now your old drafts are working for you to enhance your imagination rather than keeping you stuck within the limits of what you've already created. Above all. What I hope you're hearing throughout this whole episode is that a page one rewrite is editing progress. In fact, more than that, I believe that a page one rewrite is such significant editing progress that it's worthy of celebration. It indicates that your vision is now so clear and you're taking such a significant step forward. That it is worthwhile to create space for that vision by opening up a blink documents. And rewriting the entire story. There's no loss or failure or shame there that's progress. That's success. The page one rewrite is so challenging to embrace, but it's so, so worth it. Remember that when you embrace a page one rewrite. What you're saying is that you are not so attached to what you've already written, that you are unable to see the potential, your story holds. You're choosing to set aside anything that could be a distraction from that potential. You're choosing to create space for the next, an even better version of your story to bloom on the page. And you're recognizing then in order to give that vision, the space, it needs to flourish. It needs to start from the blank page. I hope that this helps you embrace all the many forms that editing progress can take, including the forms of editing progress that might look like going all the way back to the beginning. It is. Okay. Wonderful. Even if you're editing progress looks from the outside, like you're going all the way back to the beginning. Remember. It is not a road trip. It's a spiral staircase. And even when it feels like you're going back to the beginning. You are actually leveling up and up and up. And your manuscript will only benefit as you embrace the possibility that opens up when you let go of what is and create space for what can be. Happy editing.