Writing = Rewriting

This week I spoke to several sixth grade classes at Renfroe Middle School, and the main lesson I hoped they walked away with was that writing is really rewriting. It’s a thing I’ve been thinking about a lot this month –as I work on the edits to my upcoming middle grade novel with Katherine Tegen books, Drive Me Crazy– and it’s the only thought I can leave you with this week. Even the first three sentences have already been retooled a couple of times (words taken out or replaced, turns of phrase adjusted) while creating this entry. I feel like if you can’t get cool with this idea–if you think “rewriting” means “checking for commas and misspellings”–then you really can’t get cool with the process of writing at all. Fortunately, being able and willing to revise is also one of the neatest things about writing. It makes it is an ever-growing, organic thing that evolves and strengthens and improves each time you sit down to it.

These I copied from Laurie Halse Anderson’s blog. They ring awfully true for me: