I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of rewriting.

I don’t mean rewriting in the sense of basic editing and revision. Reordering prepositional phrases, adding a comma, deleting an adjective—this is not the stuff of great pondering no matter what Strunk and White say. I mean major overhaul: adding an intertwined storyline, removing entire chapters, deciding on a character’s death.

Back when I watched USA’s Suits, main character Harvey Specter said something that has stuck with me: “…he’ll be willing to chop off an arm to save the body.” I’ve thought about that statement every so often over the years and considered what it might mean when applied to writing.

Overall, this mentality has been helpful to me as a writer; I have experienced a number of situations in which I have had to sacrifice a beloved aspect of a WIP in order for it to live to fight another day. Whether the decision comes from an editor’s recommendation or your own realization, it’s never easy to drastically alter something you’ve toiled over, but sometimes, you have to save the body.

Whenever I’ve had a seemingly hopeless bout of writer’s block, it is because something in the WIP is not working—and a spark of inspiration only comes from significant change.

That said, I’m starting to take a closer look at why given aspects of my primary WIP seemed to stop working. Is it because I’ve grown as a writer and now realize that the offending character/scene/theme/plotline is cliche, ineffectual, contrived, nonsensical, etc.? Maybe. I know that many of my rewrites—especially the earliest ones—stemmed from this type of growth.

But, lately, I’ve come to the conclusion that other rewrites may have been prompted by a different type of growth: personal. I am not the same person that I was when I started this novel.

It has changed with me. 

At this point, it is completely unrecognizable as the manuscript I started years ago one November night—and that’s okay.

Still, I’m left with the question: How do I keep from rewriting myself into oblivion when I will never—should never—stop evolving as a person?