When is the Rewriting and Editing Done?

My first published story was Ten Unusual Features of Lulu McDunn, although it was not the first one I had written; I had several rhyming Bible stories that I was sitting on until I was ready to start pitching them. I wanted to write a story that was from my own imagination, but I really didn’t know where to start. Since it was my first attempt at writing an original story, I thought I should keep it simple. A counting book! You can’t get simpler than that! But it had to be weird to make it fun. And it should teach a lesson.

  For me, writing a story is a journey. I begin with a very basic idea and start writing, never knowing where it will lead. The first drafts are never very good. After I’ve completed a first draft, I will read through it and make corrections and improvements over and over, literally hundreds of times. Sometimes I will revisit the story many times over several years. If I like it, I will continue improving until it’s published. If I never find a publisher, I suppose I would keep making corrections on it until I’m dead. The story almost always ends up in a totally different place than I thought it would.

I suppose one reason for that might be that I write primarily in rhyme and meter, which naturally restricts my word choices. A good rhyme can shift the story into a whole new direction—the same with humor. A really clever or funny line is hard to delete or rewrite, even if keeping it means changing the direction of the story. That’s what happened with Ten Unusual Features of Lulu McDunn. It became increasingly complex and wackier the more I worked on it, until it was no longer just a simple counting book. In fact, I’m not sure how to describe it. It doesn’t have a traditional storyline. It’s just a description of a young girl’s odd physical features and how she thinks of them. The girl believes God doesn’t make mistakes, so she finds something good in all her unusual features. That wasn’t exactly how I thought the story would turn out. It’s not even the same as it was in 2009, when it was first published, but that’s how it reads all these years later. It went out of print years ago when the publisher closed its doors, but I’ve never stopped working on making it better. Perhaps I will find another publisher for it soon, before I change it into something completely different.

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”—Mark Twain