The Great Rewrite

The right to choose which darlings you kill is all yours.

One thing that prevents me from writing more is the knowledge that, inevitably, I will have to perform a rewrite. There is a significant part of me that can’t handle finding out that something I thought was perfect- holy even- actually isn’t. I read that narcissists have a fear of being ordinary, but what if I am only afraid that my writing is ordinary? This is fine right? It’s fine.

Last year I was hired to write a show based on a book. Writing the pilot was a challenging process, mainly because I had to confront tidal waves of self-doubt and inertia, but I did it and I was very pleased with the finished product. It was fun, funny, cute, intense, sexy, girly… all the best adjectives were present and accounted for.

A few weeks later, as I was basking in the afterglow of a job well done, I learned that the script had been passed around to the producers and everybody just loved it… but. Could I rewrite it from another angle and change the structure completely? I said yes of course, because I am a goddamn professional, and then set about booking a flight to Greece so I could hurl myself off the balcony overlooking the Aegean that I’d written my favorite scene from. 

I spent the following week wandering around my house in stunned silence, punctuated by occasional weeping and fits of rage. I could not fathom a world in which another version of the story existed and anyone who did must be high. I didn’t want anything to do with that world. I wanted the world to remain as I’d created it.

We are so committed to our current story, all the plans we’ve made and details we fuss over and the future we get excited about, that we tend to close ourselves off to the possibility that we may have written ourselves into a corner. That there might be an even better way forward. I still experience bursts of grief and disorientation from the rewriting of my life almost two years ago. The story wasn’t working anymore. The structure was flawed. I had to kill my darling and it hurt like fiery hell.

Eventually, I rewrote the pilot episode and liked it better. And then I rewrote it again. And when the thing gets picked up, I will probably rewrite it again. And while I will likely need to hide in a closet and cry about it for a few hours, I’ll emerge with the conviction that with every rewrite comes an opportunity to exceed my own limitations.

This is all part of the process. We let go, grieve the loss of what we wanted so badly to work, and begin again. We let go, grieve the loss of what we wanted so badly to work, and begin again and again and again. After all, you can’t have a great rewrite without a first (second, third, fourth, eleventh) draft.