Rewrite or not rewrite

[Draven68]

Hi, first ever forum post

I now have several stories published on site, all from first person.
Down the line I was toying with the idea of rewiting/rehashing a story from another main characters point of view

Interested to hear opinions. Is this considered a good tool to use, or is it basically lazy writing, milking a story for all its worth?

 

[IWroteThis]

I would suggest no.

I've done that once, to specifically address issues that I didn't think were issues until the comments started rolling in about the lack of 3rd person knowledge in a 1st person story. Then, they turned on me for retelling the same story from the missing perspective. To be honest, I couldn't even argue with them, as I don't like that approach either.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Hi, first ever forum post

I now have several stories published on site, all from first person.
Down the line I was toying with the idea of rewiting/rehashing a story from another main characters point of view

Interested to hear opinions. Is this considered a good tool to use, or is it basically lazy writing, milking a story for all its worth?

I think that as a writing exercise, for your own improvement, it was be useful. But it won't likely hold much interest for readers who have read the original.

I di something very similar for my own amusement, but never published it.

 

[Bamagan]

Hi, first ever forum post

I now have several stories published on site, all from first person.
Down the line I was toying with the idea of rewiting/rehashing a story from another main characters point of view

Interested to hear opinions. Is this considered a good tool to use, or is it basically lazy writing, milking a story for all its worth?

If you do, I recommend making the second version only partially overlapping the first one. For example, the new story (and new perspective) begins somewhere in the middle of the events of the old one, and carries on beyond the old ending point into new events.

 

[anthrodisiac]

It can be. But it should provide a very different angle on events to avoid covering the same ground. @Bamagan's suggestion is a good one. The focus isn't on the first story, this one more intersects with it than runs parallel to. Most of the time, if you're doing parallel, you want to have events muddied, and the different POV puts the events in a completely different context than the other story, at which point you could layer multiples, each providing new information to paint a fuller picture, because each thread is going to leave out pertinent details that together build the story. But it doesn't sound like that's what you're doing.

@MelissaBaby's reasoning for pursuing this is a good. It's more for putting yourself in a different headspace and trying out a new voice to find a way to tell the same story from a different angle. Doing so allows you to consider stories from multiple angles, instead of a single lens, but it might not be too terribly interesting to those who read the original.

Hopefully, that gives you some idea where you want to take this.

 

[Katie_Mae]

Hi, first ever forum post

Welcome.

I now have several stories published on site, all from first person.
Down the line I was toying with the idea of rewiting/rehashing a story from another main characters point of view

Interested to hear opinions. Is this considered a good tool to use, or is it basically lazy writing, milking a story for all its worth?

If you're interested to do it, do it. It's a hobby, right? If you care to work on a new story more, pick up the new story. If you write it and then feel it isn't something you want to publish, no need to publish.

Sometimes, character's perspectives are so different that the story can feel completely different when looked at from another angle. Other stories, not so much.

As a child, I recall reading a series about four sisters. Each book was told from the perspective of a different sister. The timelines did overlap, but not completely. So you saw some of the same scenes from different perspectives, and that could be interesting, but also there was plenty of story that was fresh.

 

[TheRedChamber]

It's a hobby so do whatever makes you happy.

That said, you may find that if you start with the idea of the same basic set up but switch the MC's point of view and then change round the names, professions and some locations, you end up with a 'new' story that isn't immediately and obviously the same as the old story. If the plot for the original was fairly simple, that might be all you need. If it was more complex, then there will probably be more scope for messing with the plot and seeing some alternative endings.

 

[Britva415]

OK so two things:

First:
Authors who draft and revise their work before publishing it (surprisingly unfamiliar concept around here, I know) may very well decide to change the POV from 1º to 3º, or vice versa. Nobody tells them "don't do it."

But when they do that, they aren't generally motivated by the simple thought, "Let's see how that sounds!" They usually have a much more sound and specific reason for "fixing" the story by doing it, and would be able to explain/articulate the narrative reasons and how/why it would serve the story to make such an investment of time and effort.

Second:

I was toying with the idea of rewiting/rehashing a story from another main characters point of view

My first mental reaction is, "that's not a rewrite, that's a different story."

If you really think that all it is is a re-hash, then, the value of doing it is probably low.

But on the other hand:

That other character has a point of view which is their own, and unrelated (or only thinly related) to what the original first-person narrator experienced. So, what is compelling about that other person's story? What is it about their experience which is worth telling? Did they experience a different theme? Learn a different lesson? Have different motivations? A different inciting event? Ramifications unseen by the original narrator character?

So, what if you stop thinking about it as a re-hash of the original story? What if you approach it as an entirely new and different story? Of course it has the same characters and covers the same events, but, if there's a different story to be told out of the same frame of events, what is that story? Why does it demand to be told?

 

[SmilingLez]

Hi, first ever forum post

I now have several stories published on site, all from first person.
Down the line I was toying with the idea of rewiting/rehashing a story from another main characters point of view

Interested to hear opinions. Is this considered a good tool to use, or is it basically lazy writing, milking a story for all its worth?

One of the questions that I've always asked myself is if I'm writing for me or am I writing for an audience in order to get warm fuzzies. That is a question only you know the answer to. YMMV


FWIW, You can always create a series and have all POVs for the same story interconnected.

 

[StillStunned]

Hi, first ever forum post

Hi, and welcome! It's always great to see fresh meat blood here.

Interested to hear opinions. Is this considered a good tool to use, or is it basically lazy writing, milking a story for all its worth?

If the other character has a story worth telling, tell it. But just because it's interesting from your original POV character's perspective doesn't mean it will have the same impact from the other perspective. There's the whole "But for me it was Tuesday" thing.

On the other hand, it could be a great idea to tell the same story from a different perspective where the original character's concerns and stakes mean almost nothing to the new character.

But, like I mentioned above, it only works if the new character's story is worth telling. If you're doing it just to provide a commentary on the first POV character's story, I think readers will see little added value. It would be a bit like "Celebrity's dogwalker spills the beans!" after you've already heard the real story.

 

[WCSGarland]

Hi, first ever forum post

I now have several stories published on site, all from first person.
Down the line I was toying with the idea of rewiting/rehashing a story from another main characters point of view

Interested to hear opinions. Is this considered a good tool to use, or is it basically lazy writing, milking a story for all its worth?

Telling a story from another point of view of the same characters from a previous story is not necessarily a rewrite or rehash. Look up the phrase literary triptych, which is telling a story from three different viewpoints. None of the view points necessarily have to cover the same events or even the same exact frame of time. I wrote the first three chapters of my series - Untethered Hearts as a triptych. It is a perfectly valid concept and many authors do the same thing.

 

[Voboy]

Lots and lots of people do this, OP.

I would never read those stories, because the idea doesn't grab me. So I'd never write them, either. But I'm not you; if you wanna? Go for it.

The one time I ran into this kind of problem, I was doing a 3P scifi series. I was using fairly close 3P, based on one character. I made something important happen to the main character (I killed her off), and when I brought her back (which was planned) I shifted the narration into 1P for just one chapter. I thought it would be a good way to gain distance from the main character, who had changed significantly and was struggling with those changes: I figured the readers would be interested in seeing her from the outside in, sort of meeting her again for the first time.

The shift in POV was not all that well-received. Lol. In other words, it was an experiment that failed. In retrospect, I might have chosen a better way to do all this, and if I was doing something similar in the future, I probably would.

So. I guess what I'm saying is that there are pitfalls with this sort of thing.