Has anyone here gone back and rewritten a LOT of content after already posting it?

[JordanAbbottComics]

My first novel wasn't very successful. Oh well, I wasn't expecting to get famous over night, but I've gotten much less of any sort of response than I was expecting. I started posting it in December, and the novel I've been uploading for less than a week has more subs, more likes, and 13 times the comments. I figured that this was since I've been promoting the week old one much more, and that's probably the main reason, but I went back to the early chapters anyway to see what went wrong and I've found that they're just bad.

Like seriously, it's absolutely crazy to see what difference just a few months of experience makes, you can definitely tell it's my first novel. So I've been really itching to go back and rewrite it, since I know what I was going for but don't think I did any of it justice. I split everything into volumes to make it more organized, and I want to go back and rewrite the first and second volumes which comes out to about 150k - 160k words, maybe more.

I'm writing volume 4 right now though, and I'm approaching things that I really want to write, and I did have a goal to reach a certain story arc by the end of the year. Should I just keep writing and only go back and rewrite after I reached my goal, or should I prioritize making the early story better for newer viewers? Does anyone have any tips to make this whole process go smoother?

[VibrantFox]

advice in rewrites or edits tend to be 50/50 but it depends on what you feel most strongly. if youre determined to hit that goal you set then you can work towards that and depending on the time available to you maybe you can set small bits aside to make notes on revisions you want to make for previous chapters

if however those early chapters may lead to plotholes or mess with the clarity of reading then it moght not hurt to go back and forth between working on revisions and new content.

how you balance things will obviously bebup to you but the key is knowing your limits and what you feel capable of doing

[thecrystalrook]

I don't think its worth it - you'll find yourself in a constant loop of rewriting as you realize earlier content is of a better quality than your mid-later content. Then you'll rewrite THAT and have to go back to your early content again. Just go with the flow - it's a journey of improvement!

[Manyana]

Sharing my personal experience. I've done a lot of rewrites. If you go to my account, you'll see Talipandas (Old Version) and Talipandas. Both the same stories, but clearly different. The old version is messy and looks like it has no plot at all, it became an info dump instead of a story itself. Now, I edited the old version twice (I created the first few chapters in Word first before posting it on Tapas, and after posting in Tapas, I still edited the chapters here and there). The newer version, I edited a lot, and by a lot, I mean A LOT. From the old version, I copied and pasted it on the new version, but before I posted the chapters, I did a major editing (removing most of the info dump and actually creating a "story"). Then, I tried to abide by the "bite-size" thing that Tapas encourages their novelists to do, so I revised my book and it became s h i ~, like it no longer has a story (I couldn't compress the chapters/subplots into just 1k words). I went to hiatus to do my work justice. And right now, the book is clearer and became more readable for the readers.

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Now, rewriting helped me get back on track and everything. But if your book is initially readable already, stick with it first and do the editing and everything once you finish the book. By then, you'll be able to know how to address the plotholes and everything in your story. You'll also have a better grasp on how to "show" infos rather than dumping them. I only rewrote my novel because it is s h i ~ ~ y

[Manyana]

And just to add, even if you edit and rewrote your story while still in the middle of writing the whole book, after you finished writing it, you will go back again and edit from the start anyway. So if it's readable and has little to no errors (grammar, spelling, punctuations), then let it stay that way. And then you go back and edit the whole thing after you're done. just a suggestion

[JordanAbbottComics]

Well it's definitely "readable," but that isn't really the main problem. It's readable, sure, but it's kind of clear I didn't really know what I was doing. I don't really have any major plotholes, but there are definitely things in there that would take the reader out of the story.

Characters acting one way, then another way a couple of chapters later without any explanation, a character that wound up getting completely erased from the story since I didn't have the time to keep including her, saying that a cult is really well known for something, but not seeing any of that even when we've spent time covering life in said cult, that kind of stuff.

I just feel that the beginning is the part that needs to be good if I want people to keep reading further into it. First impressions are everything after all. I'm just worried my bad writing towards the beginning will turn readers away, and they won't get to any of t he things that I actually wrote really well.

[TheLemmaLlama]

Ohhh I totally get rewriting a whole bunch of stuff; we improve so quickly when we're just starting out :'D

Fortunately for me, I haven't posted any substantial amount of content before my rewrites. Guess that's the advantage to doing a comic; it really slows you down so that when you get to actually drawing a scene, you would've already gotten the bad drafts out of the way XD

[Aeneas1]

Nixvir is currently undergoing a re-vamp for the earlier chapters. To make the captions more legible, you see.

[metheenaroonie]

No. The reason is because I tend to create very solid backstories that protect me from rewriting what I already put out there. One of the things that bother me about modern storytelling is the popularity of retconning of stories and characters. I get bothered by investing in a character and story, only for the writer to rewrite it. It leaves me feeling like, why did I spend any time at all on this story?

[DualDragons]

Nope. I don't really rewrite my content nowadays. The most I do is maybe do pantsing for some details that makes the planned stuff more interesting.

[NickRowler]

I have gone back and fixed some dialogue in my comic. Like fixing grammar errors, removing bad jokes, changing font, and fixing names. I have never just rewrote a whole page. I have been pressured to rewrite the first chapter of one of my series but I also would rather work on something new.

[SynergyEclipse]

I’ve rewritten a lot! Knowing that I sunk a lot of time and effort that become undone frustrates me because of sunk costs, but I wouldn’t have been happy continuing earlier drafts.

I heard that readers can be pretty forgiving of rough art at the start of a comic or webtoon though I still wanted the art to be as polished as possible! I also did a lot of rewrites that were retcons since a lot of details for characters or lore became more established later on in the story. That’s to say there’s more I should’ve planned from the beginning!

Going back to retcon things could be necessary to improve the reader’s experience by making characters or details about the lore consistent when the earlier parts were unclear or contradicted it, and to fix plot holes. However, it can be messy and frustrating to do!

I plan out a lot more to help prevent the need for any more retcons and prevent plot holes.

If the early chapters had any passages that were clunky or otherwise could be reworded to flow more smoothly, making those changes could also be worth it to improve the readability. A few months of writing makes a lot of difference!

[system]

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