Right now I am drawing chapter 4 of my comic at the same time that I redraw chapter 1, I do it because I am not very satisfied with the result and I want to improve it a little
I want to do this all the time!
I keep getting ideas after the fact that are like, "this is so much better! I wish I'd done that!"
Then again, we're all constantly improving as writers, so I suppose we're always coming up with new and better ideas.
If we started again every time we thought of something better, nothing would get done.
And I'm saying this as someone who spent years making his comic because I did just that.
I totally get where everyone's coming from. Hub JETIRKO is an 8 year old concept that has finally gone somewhere in terms of plotline.
I relayed this briefly on another forum thread, so I won't go into too much detail here. But I reworked the entire plot a couple months ago and things that didn't work together finally did. Sometimes it's what you gotta do.
Good luck to everyone here. It's a big task, but man is it worth it sometimes!
Probably to some extent.
I'm really happy with the vibe of the first half of my story, but after that I felt like the plot strayed a little too far from the core ideas behind everything. I don't really see how I can change it satisfactorily at the moment, and I probably won't seeing as it's already half completed.
I guess if I were to rewrite the second half, I would try to stick to one location. Changing it hurt the pacing a little, in my opinion.
For my comic Crow's Worth, I sort of wish I could rewrite the first chapter and parts of the 3rd chapter.
Mostly because they sort of set up the wrong tone for the series. There are some weird 4th wall breaks that I don't really like looking back. I don't want to delete or replace the old pages because I think people should be allowed to read them if they wanted to. But if I was in a situation where I was asked to adapt the series into a show/movie/game/etc. I would probably ask to have those parts removed.
For background, I'm a published author who's been writing and editing in various ways since 1998. So, I'm looking back at writing career that is now approaching a full quarter of a century long (most of which is non-fiction - my fiction career was killed by the Lord of the Rings glut in the early 2000s, and never really recovered).
(Realizing that this might require some explanation, back in the early 2000s the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies were a massive hit, and fantasy publishers started buying up everything they could get their hands on. If you ended up on the right side of that, you got in. If you ended up on the wrong side of that, the response time for AGENTED submissions - and I was agented at the time - went from months to years. I finally gave up on the big publishers and the system when I found myself wanting to ask my agent how many decades I was going to have to wait for a reply. Let's just say that there was a time that I would wholeheartedly suggest trying the numbers game of submitting books to the big publishers...and today I would be very reluctant to suggest that.)
And my answer is actually...no, I wouldn't. I would do some additional editing before publication of one of my previously unpublished novels, but I would not even consider doing a rewrite. Too much of value would be lost.
For example, I have two serials on Tapas right now. The first is Magus Draconum (https://tapas.io/series/Magus-Draconum/info), which I wrote at the beginning of my career around the age of 23-24 and ended up on the wrong side of the glut. It received a couple of edits over the years, but that's about it. I uploaded it to play around with the platform while I learned how to use it before I launched my main project, Re:Apotheosis.
Re:Apotheosis (https://tapas.io/series/ReApotheosis/info) was written this year in a two-month marathon at the age of 45. It encompasses a quarter of a century of experience in both the creative industry, pop culture commentary, life experience, and my own personal growth as a writer.
Without doubt, when it comes to style, Re:Apotheosis is the better written of the two. My prose is more refined, the characters probably better developed, the emotional beats better earned, and the pacing and structure are just smoother. BUT...
...there are risks I take in Magus Draconum that I would NEVER take today. Character and storytelling decisions that I know better than to make after over 20 years in this field. There's one scene coming up that, as a father, I would be physically incapable of writing (let's just say that those mature content warnings are not there for show). And that gives the story a level of rawness and vitality that Re:Apotheosis will never reach. The story works as it does BECAUSE, not knowing any better, I took those risks. If I were to rewrite Magus Draconum, those qualities would be lost. It's just not a story that 45 year-old me would tell in the first place.
That said, there are parts of both stories that should hit the reader like a ton of bricks when they read it, and Re:Apotheosis is not a story that 24 year-old me could have ever put on the page - it needs. But it's an important thing to remember when you're thinking about rewriting old work - yes, there's nothing stopping you from doing it, but you're not the same storyteller you were back when you wrote it. The decisions you would make now are not necessarily going to make it better.
No. I think we grow a lot in our ideas, in the way we write. And we are made to grow that way. if we go back and focus on perfecting something as good as we can. That is impossible to do. Because even as you are working on it to perfect it. You are getting better and better at the skill you are doing. Because you are doing it. So esentially by the time you say finish writing that book from the start to the end you are already better at your craft than you were when you started. esentially making the process non backwards reversable.
For sure try your best. Do your best. And write multiple times. But if you have finished something say two years ago and you want to go back and rewrite it. Don't. Because the skill you have now are better used to further the new writing and ideas you will surely come to create. As writers we never run out of ideas. But time. Is never our friend.
I've been working on my comic STELLAR PERSONA for a few years now and looking back if it started it over i would rewrite a few thing. The main story would stay about the same but I would definitely rewrite the story pacing and add more character development in places. On a similar note, My art style for the comic has improved over time so the first pages Don't look very good compared to the most recent pages. However, I doubt that I'm ever going to do that any time soon because that would mean I'd have to draw new and redraw over 100 pages!
Maybe I will one day, Maybe I won't.
Appreciate your feedback, as someone whose worked in the industry. Being in my mid twenties myself, I wonder what things I’ll create now that I never would in the future. I’m definitely unsure about reworking my comic, even though I’m early enough on, and it is a recent enough work, that I could do it. In fact it’s current work. But, I’m definitely attached to it too, and part of me is worried I’m just impatient for more people to read or discuss the story.
I have changed the plot and storyline countless times as I updating my progress in Tapas weekly. It was refreshing and you get to learn that there is no boundaries in creating the world of your own into a perfection. Perfection? Hmm, I can't say it was a perfection, but rather something that is acceptable and variable to majority to accept the story/ art of your own. It was struggling, but if you got a chance to look back and realize the road you've walked, it will be so comforting and proud of yourself as you've improved in presenting your story to the community.
You should never be afraid to rework your current work. It has to work as a whole, from start to finish. The last thing you want is to suddenly find yourself running into problems because you forgot to add something in an earlier chapter and can't go back.
To take a couple of examples, the novel that I decided against using as my "learn how to use this platform" serial started off with two groups whose paths eventually meet about a third of the way through the book (as I recall). We'll call them groups A and B. So, what I was doing at the start was alternating chapters between group A and group B. Chapter 1 would be somebody from group A starting their journey, chapter 2 would be somebody from group B, chapter 3 would be somebody else from group A, etc.
About 20-30,000 words in (the book ended up being around 110,000 words, as I recall), I realized this alternating structure caused a massive problem. Because neither of the two groups started off together, you literally had a situation where the character introduced in chapter 1 might not be seen again until chapter 5 (chapter 1 introduces character 1, chapter 3 introduces character 2, and then chapter 5 returns to character 1), at which point the reader would have forgotten who they are and what happened to them. I was shooting myself in the foot with my own story structure. So, what I did was combine all of the group A chapters into Part I, and all of the group B chapters into Part II, and both parts ended at the point where the two groups met.
A second example happened in the outlining for Re:Apotheosis. As I wrote the climax of the conflict in the outline (back when it was a stealth pitch for a sequel to Re:Creators that was plotting itself in my head no matter what I did to try to make it stop), it suddenly became very important that a certain character is able to get her hands on a handgun. In Japan (a country with very strict firearms laws). This gun did not exist in the story prior to writing that scene in the climax. So, I had to figure out where this gun came from, and how it got from its point of origin to the character so that it could be used in the climax. That sent me back into the earlier parts of the outline to insert and track this gun to its end point (because if it suddenly appears out of nowhere, it's going to jar the reader out of the story).
(And, this is why if you're going to write a serial that starts going live before it's finished, you need to do a detailed outline first to catch all of these things. That way you're not suddenly stuck in a corner where you have to either twist yourself into a pretzel to make something work at the last minute or revise earlier chapters that your subscribers have already read and change the story out from under them.)
Sound advice, I definitely am new to planning a serial from the start, as I tend to write pretty singular self contained works, I thought maybe I didn’t need todo much planning and see where the road would take me- now I realize they probably need as much or more planning then certain single or short stories. I definitely had a problem with “head hopping” point of view in an earlier version of the comic, way way back when I first had the rough idea for it when I was in high school, lol. So, I can relate to realizing later how perilous it can be to try and tell a big story in that way.
You have a point, and I appreciate all the positive feedback I’ve gotten from people off of this thread! There are a lot of ways to look at the idea of rewriting I didn’t even consider.
Okay weirdly this thread has inspired me not to rewrite for now, finish the first volume, and then decide if I still want to make major changes or not. Thanks everyone!
Reworking is super important for current works! I would never rewrite finished works ever though. It shows your growth. And Like I said before. If you always want to rewrite because you have gotten better as a writer then you will be rewriting for the rest of your life.
I will, but only because this is the only major work I will ever produce because writing is a hobby, not a money-maker, and I can't continue this pace for the rest of my life lol. Once I finish my 4-arc long novel, I will go back and redo what I have to. Because once this is finished, and once I revise it all, it's all I will have. Why not make it better before trying to do something with it?
Thats smart. I am not doing it for money either. I just have too many things in my head. Hahaha But yeah if you are planning on just those four novels then why not make them special. Good luck to you on your adventure in writing. When a story needs to be told a story will be. XD
Rewriting the whole (or most) of the story - a strong no. I love quite a few scenes and conversations to much to lose them.
That being said, If I'd ever be lucky enough to afford a professional editor - I wouldn't mind editing the story from top to bottom with him/her. I'm sure there are quite some redundant sentences or underdeveloped parts that require adjustment (and that I'm blind to due to lack of knowledge) - fixing them would be a welcomed thing.
My story was already rewritten several times before and at the moment I don't see a reason to rewrite it again. I will at some point make some adjustments in dialogues and some key panels, to reinforce ideas that I now realize I could have presented better, but no more than that.
Maybe tomorrow I'll realize there is some giant plot hole and restart it all, but at the moment it's okay 
1 month later
closed Aug 15, '22
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