Rewrites, What was your largest?

[ShelbyDawn57]

So, I have this story I'm working on(18K words) about an older guy that's depressed and lonely. He ends up in a relationship with another man. Nothing wrong with that, except I've been stuck on the story for a while. What I've decided to do, is rewrite it into a traditional Romance, MF. I just think it will make a better story. I've had severe changes of direction before, but never with a story I was thin far along in.

Just curious, what was your biggest rewrite and why?

 

[StillStunned]

Chapter 5 of The Rivals. I was about 10k words in when I decided to change it entirely. The reason was that the best part of the stories is the chemistry between the main characters, and so far they'd barely interacted. So changed the entire plot to it started with them together.

I cannibalised parts for the new version, but most of it had to go.

 

[AchtungNight]

The Rendezvous. I wanted to femslash the four young lead actresses from The Upside of Anger and kept finding out things about them I did not know and some readers had trouble accepting. Characters kept throwing new hurdles at me too. “I want to be a virgin to women!” “I want to be a heterosexual virgin!” “I’m okay with being a secret swinger, but can you portray my religion as positive for me please?” “How about a fight scene?” “Can we get Lauren Ambrose in the story as a side reference?” “Can we all get together the first day we meet?”

The story was a mess but I got it out. You can do the same with yours. Just make it work as best you can.

 

[gunhilltrain]

So, I have this story I'm working on(18K words) about an older guy that's depressed and lonely. He ends up in a relationship with another man. Nothing wrong with that, except I've been stuck on the story for a while. What I've decided to do, is rewrite it into a traditional Romance, MF. I just think it will make a better story. I've had severe changes of direction before, but never with a story I was thin far along in.

Just curious, what was your biggest rewrite and why?

A chance for self-promotion and I'm one of the first in! https://classic.literotica.com/s/my-summer-with-nora-ch-01 was originally a stand-alone story with a single sequel. A reader complained that is was drab and unsatisfying because the guy only gets the girl as a hooker-client. After a very long time, I rewrote it so that their relationship is much longer and more complex and it spawned a large number of stories that fit in with the other City College tales. (The sequel was dropped for a different one.) It was a rare time when I took a reader's advice.

 

[Stimtheone]

I completely rewrote the story that got the DE-verse started, and it's 460 google doc pages while the original was maybe 200. So that is my biggest rewrite.

 

[BarracudaSwordfish]

Too many to mention.

I have changed characters, points of view, third person narrative to first and vice versa so many times my keyboard is crapped out and I have mouse finger.

My current female lead, sweet little West Country Aggie, has been in three stories so far but has never seen the light of day. Love the kid, but cannot get her right in my head. Almost 80k words, but nothing to publish yet. Hopefully soon.

As Aggie might say herself, 'Hurry up, my lovely. I'm gagging for it here!"

 

[ElectricBlue]

I'd never rewrite a story. If I liked an old story's subject matter that much, I'd write a new story, with my "today writer's" style, but not rehash an old one.

 

[ItsJustMeApathy]

I have a longish story that is nearly finished, have maybe another chapter left to write down(it's written in my head) but I want to rewrite the whole thing.

I started it about 8 years ago and I think it needs some polishing. And some things in the world have happened and changed and it makes the story need some tweaking.

It's like 150,000 words though so it will probably never happen.

 

[Voboy]

I'd never rewrite a story. If I liked an old story's subject matter that much, I'd write a new story, with my "today writer's" style, but not rehash an old one.

Me too. I seldom bother. I think I might have done a rewrite once or twice, because I decided to go from TP to FP, about 4-5k words in.

Otherwise, I just scrap it and start fresh.

 

[OuietlyLooking]

I think mine wasn't on here. I had one story published professionally, in the UK for a magazine. I still recall the letter they send with their "suggestions". I re-wrote it with their suggestions in mind and they published it! It was no longer like the original in any way, except for the main characters names.

 

[karina_jayde]

I've had a ridiculous amount of re-writes for chapter 5 of my Duchess of Lust series. Had about 15K words about 5 years ago before I had to step away for a while. Wrote another 80K before realizing it was getting too unwieldy, stripped that 80K back and re-used a ton of it down to about 30K, then realized that still wasn't working.

So all in all about a 100K words that have been rewritten in one form of another. However, a lot of the ideas and interactions were able to be stripped down and reworked into the final rewrite, and it also helped me get back into the groove of writing for those characters after so long. So wasn't a waste of effort.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I'd never rewrite a story. If I liked an old story's subject matter that much, I'd write a new story, with my "today writer's" style, but not rehash an old one.

I think the same way.

If I have the inspiration to start a story, I begin story-boarding it before I start writing. This isn't an outline so much as ideas for the plot and characters that will develop as the story does. I begin a timeline for the story and align that with key characters and plot elements.

It's not as organized as this might make it sound, but it does allow me to maintain consistency and remain true to the original inspiration as the story unfolds. Since I never publish incomplete work, I have never had to rewrite a story. I have gone back and modified sections earlier in the work to align them with a changed direction or a new idea but these are usually minor exposition-type additions.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Rewrites, What was your largest?​

I wrote four stories here under a different pseudonym. I’m not quite as blonde as I seem and they all had I/T elements (which was a tweak on an IRL relationship with a family friend). I didn’t even know I was going to start to take writing semi-seriously then and I was going for what I laughably thought was shock value. I also was a bit messed up mentally (more so than normal).

When I started to write under my current name, which is more me IRL, I felt like I wanted to reclaim these early stories, but that I was now totally uncomfortable with the fabricated incest element. So I rewrote all four to eliminate this. A bit of a labor of love.

Once again, Laurel was super understanding about the process.

Em

 

[Djmac1031]

There's two I recall, let's start with the first.

The first chapter of The Jenna Arrangement was a simple enough tale; bored older man pays young college girl to watch him masturbate. Simple story based on a simple fantasy of mine.

The first chapter did so well I decided to continue and came up with a way to bring them back together for some more CFNM fun.

Then came chapter three. Where the main male character Tom again finds himself naked around the lovely young Jenna while they make breakfast together.

As the story progressed i had Jenna suddenly jumping on his lap and fucking him right in the kitchen.

Wrote the scene; it was hot. It was sexy. And it was completely WRONG.

Jenna's voice was in my head, telling me this wasn't her. She still barely knew this guy, and while she was having fun with him, she wasn't ready just yet to go all the way.

And so I scrapped the sex scene in favor of another CFNM scenario and just had Jenna ramp up her cock tease game.

It was the right move. Readers loved it, praising the slown burn approach.

 

[Djmac1031]

My second even more major rewrite was a story I was writing for the Nude Day contest called My Daughter, The Nudist.

The premise is in the title; Dad has to learn to deal with his daughter walking around naked.

Originally it was going to be a typical incest tale, the Daughter slowly but surely breaking her fathers willpower to resist and seducing him.

But then I started thinking: what if they DIDN'T fuck?

What if, instead, the Daughter was simply embracing nudism as a liberating lifestyle, and Dad was struggling to come to grips with seeing his adult daughter naked and trying desperately not to be sexually attracted to her.

And so I scrapped about half the story and took out any scenes where it implied the daughter was trying to seduce him or make her nudity overtly sexual and instead just had Dad dealing with his own dark thoughts as best he could.

 

[thetiesthatbindme]

I think mine wasn't on here. I had one story published professionally, in the UK for a magazine. I still recall the letter they send with their "suggestions". I re-wrote it with their suggestions in mind and they published it! It was no longer like the original in any way, except for the main characters names.

WTF? Well,at least I found out early you're just like all the other lying a holes here!

 

[Duleigh]

I'm right in the middle of a big re-write. A Story I wrote a few years ago when everyone thought I was dying ended up being 208,800 words. I shelved it because it was awful, the grammar and wording was clunky at best. Right now I'm cutting it up into pieces and publishing a series of stories. I'm about a third of the way through the story and the first three stories I got out of it were accepted quite well

Andi's Dream - A Blizzard in Buffalo
Andi's Dream - A Wedding to Plan
Andi's Dream - Joy To The World (W)

There's enough story left in the original for at least five more stories.

This is proof of Duleigh's Demandment #8 - Thou shalt throw nothing away, ideas are forever useful but oft times forgotten

Don't throw any stories or story fragments away, you can recover the central idea and use it somewhere else

 

[samhasstories]

I rewrite a lot. If I decide the story is heading in a direction I didn't initially foresee, I find it much easier to start fresh than try to go back and shoehorn ideas in with revisions. That's the cost of writing without a plan.

As far as the size of rewrite, I'm not sure exactly. I have novel-length works in progress that I've scrapped and started over. It can be a daunting proposition, but to my mind not as daunting as looking at that mass of text and knowing it needs to be reworked from the inside out.

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

I’ve read the original post as a request to recount how an unfinished work was changed sharply during the writing, not whether a published work was later changed.

I started a story intended to show the presentation, and visual recording, of female nudity, as this pursuit developed in the United States from the 1950s to the present. The early writing put the characters in a standard trope of women as exhibitionists and men as voyeurs. I found that this limited their development and made them uninteresting as people. I stopped, rethought, and started over.

While the finished product still has the women displaying their naked bodies, and men finding ways to record those displays, the emphasis is now on how they pushed the envelopes in which society had confined them, making the society more open. It’s 18k+ words, and I found it best to use the Mature category, rather than Exhibitionist & Voyeur.

https://literotica.com/s/front-leg-across

 

[MrPixel]

I originally thought "this thread doesn't apply to me", but scanning my WIP folder realized that I've been holding a 12-chapter installment of a series since April for a 6K-word chapter that absolutely needs a top-down rewrite. Tense and POV are all over the place and the flow is incongruous with the rest of the work. The material needs to be covered because it sets-up the universe for following chapters, so I can't just leave it out. I feel backed into a corner on this and barely know where to start over again with it.

My attentions are elsewhere at the moment, but maybe I'll get over the writer's block on this over the holidays.

 

[Duleigh]

ARRGH - after answering this thread I went back to work on Enchantress 8 - Hail to the Queen, and had an idea that would add a little spice to the story.... rewrite!
and I want to finish it by Dec 31