Listen:
(Full episode transcript below show notes)
Hey, friends! I’m back in my chair (!!!) after a second round of spine surgery, and ready to dive into something less medical but equally complex: rewriting.
If you’ve ever found yourself stuck in an endless loop of “Just one more edit” or “This could be even 1% better,” this episode is for you. We’ll talk about how fear sneaks into our writing and in the guise of perfectionism, the difference between necessary and compulsive rewriting, trusting ourselves, and how to build gentle systems to help you finish your projects — and move on to new ones.
I’ll also share my very official new anti-rewriting system with you! (Spoiler: it involves Tim, a binder, and a solemn promise…)
So grab your favorite beverage, settle in, and let’s talk about learning to trust ourselves as writers — even when it feels scary, messy, or horribly imperfect. Because, honestly, that’s where the magic happens.
Resources & Links:
- “The Ultimate Asset For Writers” — WN 169
- “Writing Out Of Spite” — WN 168
- “Writing When You’re Not Okay” — WN 167
- Speculative Fiction Story Club: YouTube | Live Thursdays on Twitch
- Weekly Create-Alongs: Wednesdays 7-9pm CT on Twitch and YouTube
- Get my “Dear Creators” Emails
Support The Show
I make The Write Now Podcast on my own time & my own dime so that you can enjoy and share it for free. If you’d like to support the work I’m doing, please consider becoming a patron over on Patreon!
Or, if you prefer, you can also support me on Ko-Fi or via PayPal. 🙂 Thank you!
Full Episode Transcript:
(00:00):
This is the Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 170: The Rewriting Cycle.
(00:26):
Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and… I had spine surgery.
(00:46):
“Now, Sarah,” you may be saying, “I thought you already had spine surgery years ago to fuse your spine together!” And yes, I did, but now I have more spine surgery. It’s like a really weird collection. Basically, the first time I had it was to fuse my spine to correct scoliosis, and this time it was a microdiscectomy to correct two herniated discs in my lumbar — hence the reason I have been sitting on the floor for months, et cetera, et cetera. I am excited to tell you that right now I am sitting in a chair at my desk and I am so excited about it.
(01:29):
This is one of the many reasons why I’ve only released a handful of Write Now podcast episodes this year, but I have not stopped writing. You’ll notice that my last several Write Now podcast episodes have been “The Ultimate Asset For Writers”, “Writing Out Of Spite”, and “Writing When You Are Not Okay”, which I feel really sort of brings you along with me on my journey this year. And whether or not you have had spinal surgery, you may still be having a little bit of a rough year, and so hopefully these episodes have been helpful, impactful. If you haven’t listened to them yet, that’s absolutely fine. You can listen to them whenever you want or not at all. It is up to you, but they are there if those sound like things that you need to think about a little bit, because I sure did.
(02:20):
I did a lot of writing when I wasn’t okay. I did a lot of writing out of spite, and in that most recent episode, “The Ultimate Asset for Writers”, I really had to dig into why I was writing, and what made life worth living, and why creative writing continued and continues to be such a powerful force in my life. 10 years ago, I released an episode called “Writing As Self-Care”, and 10 years later, that is still absolutely the case. But while I was writing this year, and writing very prolifically, I felt a sort of diminishment, and I don’t even necessarily mean it’s because I was sitting on the floor to write.
(03:06):
I think it’s because I lost confidence in myself and in my ability to write, which sounds strange, right? Because I’m writing more than usual. But I feel less and less able to speak about writing, able to teach people things about writing. I thought about this for a while, and it might be a simple case of “the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know”.
(03:33):
So the more you learn about a certain subject, the more you realize, “Wow, I have a lot more to learn about that subject.” Learning begets learning. There’s a lot of surface level stuff, like, oh, here is story structure. Oh, here is how to develop a character. But then when you really dig down into it and you start building characters in different ways and you start breaking different rules, it gets a little bit more shaky about what is certain, what is known, and what you feel qualified to teach or even talk about.
(04:10):
I think that part of my issue to this loss of confidence in myself as a writer despite writing a lot, was because of what I was writing. I don’t think we’ve talked about this before on the Write Now podcast, but I have a huge problem with rewriting things. Part of this is because I am a recovering perfectionist. Part of it is that, yes, I want everything to be perfect, which as we all know is not possible because perfect is an ideal that does not exist. So I back off and I say, “Well, I just want things to sound good,” but that’s not entirely why I have been rewriting things. Sure, I’ve added and subtracted and put in new scenes, taken out scenes, written out characters, but the type of rewriting I was doing was the equivalent of treading water. I wasn’t making any real changes for any real reason.
(05:14):
I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced something like this, but often because I’ve been working on this huge project for so long — I’ve been working on season two of Girl in Space for a couple of years now — I can’t always remember what I’ve added in or taken out. And I’ll find myself in an episode down the road writing something like, “Oh, this is a great scene. This fits really well here only to go back to an earlier episode”… and realize I have already written this scene in this episode.
(05:45):
So not only was I rewriting things to polish them and make them — well, if not perfect, then “better”, whatever that means; I was also just straight up writing things that I had forgotten I had already written.
(06:04):
Some of you who know me well might know that my memory is actually terrible. This has always been a very frustrating thing for both me and the people in my life, and a few years ago when I was diagnosed with ADHD, it started making a lot more sense. So: my working memory is not super functional, and that’s what we draw upon when we write. We’re using our working memory. And that was a large reason why I was essentially forgetting that I had already written some of these things.
(06:34):
But I know that you have probably not had this specific experience happen to you (or maybe you have, and I would love to talk with you about it more and understand what are we doing and why are we doing it and what’s going on here).
(06:49):
But chances are, in your writing, you have found yourself doing rewrites, whether it is a second draft of a story, whether it is an obsessive going through the beginning of your story every time you open it and looking for things to polish, putting in commas, taking out commas, using the thesaurus to substitute one word for another, when really they both mean the same thing. I’ve done both, and if you have another reason that you maybe do rewrites, if you have another reason why you sort of draw out finishing a story, I would love to hear about that in the comments for today’s episode.
(07:34):
The little moments throughout the last several months when I realized I was rewriting things that I had already written without knowing it, and even the times when I was knowingly rewriting something, telling myself that, “Oh, this time, this time I’ll make it work! This time, I’ve got all my ideas in place and I can just write out this story and it will be so beautiful.”
(07:57):
Every time I caught myself rewriting, I would feel this sense of despair — like, actual despair. I remember sitting on the floor at my little floor writing desk, looking back through a draft of something that I wrote in… gosh, March, 2025, and I had just written it in, I think it was September, 2025.
(08:24):
And eventually, I recognized the problem, came up with some solutions and implemented one. Basically, what I did was I started printing out episodes of the show once they were finished putting them in a binder and giving that binder to my husband and creative partner, Tim, and telling him, “Under no circumstances am I allowed to open up this binder!” So now every time I finish an episode, I print it out, punch holes in it, and I give the episode to Tim. Is this maybe a little silly? Is this maybe a little extreme? Probably, but it’s working so far and I am so incredibly grateful for that.
(09:07):
I am so grateful to have someone like Tim in my life who I can trust with my work, but even more than that, I feel like I’m finally getting on the road back to being able to trust myself, to write reasonably on track, to not get caught up in what are essentially unnecessary rewrites. I was on an AuthorTube video recently, and at the very beginning we checked in about our writing and I found myself saying, “Yeah, I’m on the seventh draft of season two of Girl In Space”, and my friend Jimmie, who has been on this show before as an interview guest — Hello, Jimmie! — my friend Jimmie was like, “Sarah, seven revisions is too many revisions.” And I agree. I think even, y’know, if I would’ve even stopped at five, that would’ve been too many revisions.
(10:04):
Now, part of this is one of the pitfalls of being a pantser — so, someone who writes by the seat of their pants; an exploratory writer; someone who does not put their ideas in an outline ahead of time, and then follow that outline as they write the story. For better or for worse, every time I create an outline for a story, I just lose all of my momentum for it. So part of what keeps me motivated is the sense of writing as I’m going.
(10:34):
However, you might be able to see here, the issue with that is what I’m writing is messy and needs a lot of rewrites. But there are necessary rewrites, and then there are the sort of rewrites you do when you’re worried that what you’ve written is not good enough. You’re scared that people will not like what you’ve written. The little perfectionist that lives in your brain nudges you and says, “You could just make this even 1% better.” There’s even days where I rewrite because I need to be writing something and my brain is dead and dry and I have no ideas, and I’m like, “Well, maybe if I write the last paragraph that I left off on, I’ll pick something up. I’ll have some momentum. I’ll remember what was important to me about this scene and why I was writing it, what its purpose was.” And so there’s also that type of rewriting.
(11:32):
I should mention that I write by hand with a pen on notebook paper, and so when I rewrite, I’m not deleting big chunks and rewriting them. It’s all here. It’s in a binder. There’s crossed out sections. There’s sections where I have rewritten the same paragraph several times because I was trying to get back into the right headspace for it. We have a ton of different reasons why we rewrite things, and as much as I don’t want to admit it, as much as I am the kind of person who says, “Yeah, I’ve been working on my perfectionism for years now,” as much as I say “I’m a recovering perfectionist…” I don’t know if perfectionism is necessarily a condition we can recover from.
(12:15):
I think we can treat it, and I think we can learn to live with the discomfort it causes. I think that we can move past the blocks it puts in our way. I think that we can finish things and print them or publish them and move on to the next project. But I don’t think my perfectionism has gone away. It’s one of those things where, logically, it doesn’t make sense that I would hold onto something like this. Logically, I understand that nothing can be capital-P “Perfect”. There is no platonic ideal of season two of Girl In Space, and that’s part of the problem for me. With perfectionism, I am reaching toward a goal that has not been defined. I am striving for a bar that I can’t see, that doesn’t exist. Things could always be a little bit better. Things could always be improved by 1%… right?
(13:16):
I feel like it’s the same way with money. You could always be a little richer. Even if you have a yacht and a butler and seven different vacation homes, you could always still have a little more money. When enough has no upper limit, when satisfaction cannot happen until the impossible happens, I feel like that’s a problem.
(13:39):
The funny thing is, five or 10 years ago, I would’ve told you that yes, I had defeated my perfectionism. I had journaled about it. I understood why I was doing it. I understood it was fear-based. I addressed those fears. But I know more now. I know that we can’t get rid of certain parts of ourselves. We can’t, quote, “fix” certain parts of ourselves that we interpret as being bad or broken.
(14:07):
We can improve our behavior. We can tone down or train our responses to these things. So for me, my fear in which my perfectionism is based… let’s face it, I’m never going to be a hundred percent completely fearless, and even if I was a hundred percent completely fearless, that would not be a good thing. I would wander out into the street not being afraid of being hit by a car, right? Our fear is there to protect us. It just may be sometimes protects us from things that we don’t necessarily need protection from.
(14:45):
So my goal is not to get rid of fear. My goal is not to wipe out this instinct that every human being has. My goal is to work around it. My goal is to learn how to trust myself again as a writer and be able to move forward and actually finish projects and then start new ones. That’s what I miss the most. I miss starting new projects after having finished old ones. And I have so many ideas and so many stories to tell.
(15:16):
For me, what works is I come up with systems. My working memory is terrible? I carry a notebook with me everywhere I go, and I write down things that I think are going to be important — appointment dates, interesting things that I hear people say, interesting passages from a book I’m reading, my thoughts in the moment, my to-do list for the rest of the day. I’ve created a system to compensate for the struggles and issues I’ve had with my memory, just like getting glasses so that I can see. Glasses are a system that help my eyes, which have an astigmatism and some other stuff going on. Wearing glasses helps my eyes to see — it is a helpful system. Taking my antidepressants is a helpful system. And so this is one more system that helps me to live and function like I think normal writers do.
(16:10):
But of course, we know there is no such thing as a normal writer. There’s just a bunch of creative people doing the very best work that we can in the situations in which we find ourselves. I have no memory? I’ll carry around a notebook. I can’t see? I put on my glasses. I find myself obsessively rewriting and rewriting and rewriting the same things over again sometimes without even realize that I’m doing it? I print those pages out, I give them to Tim. I tell him I’m not allowed to look at or even touch those pages and I move on.
(16:46):
There’s this idea of getting in our own way being a bad thing, but I’ve found that sometimes you need to get in your own way. If there is something that is not conducive to your writing, such as compulsive rewriting, it may be a good time to explore, “Okay, what can I do to keep myself from doing that?” I stay hydrated by keeping a giant jug of water on my desk and, through muscle memory, I just pick it up and drink from it every once in a while. I’ve created a system that keeps me from getting dehydrated with all the coffee I drink. But in order to put that roadblock, that helpful roadblock there, I had to understand what I was doing and why I was doing it.
(17:34):
And if it’s multifaceted — like, for me, it was caused by both ADHD symptoms and perfectionism — you have to really work out what’s at play here, what needs to be corrected, adjusted, stopped, forgiven. What can be put in place that’s helpful? What can you put in your way to keep yourself from getting in your own way?
(17:58):
Perfectionism keeps me from finishing my project because I can always go back and rewrite it and make it just a little bit better (or that’s what it tells me in the back of my brain), but it’s also a little bit self-serving. It’s a little bit self-protecting, because that perfectionism means I don’t have to finish the project just yet. I can go back and do rewrites. I can justify that to myself as progress because I’m making changes even though they are a comma here, a semicolon there. They’re very insignificant, but it’s a way to procrastinate finishing and putting my work out into the world, and potentially being judged.
(18:41):
There’s a lot of scary stuff about publication. You may know this. You might be experiencing it. You’ve written something, and it’s terrifying to show it to someone. There’s a lot of critics out there. There’s a lot of people who will have opinions about what you create, and they will want you to know their opinions.
(19:01):
But I think that’s why I have held on to the perfectionism. Some unconscious part of me recognizes that if I can continue to perfect things, it prevents me from the scary thing of publishing. It prevents me from the scary thing of marketing and being judged and receiving reviews. But at some point, at some point before those rewrites become a sort of self-soothing procrastination tactic, before those rewrites dip into the unnecessary side of things, I have to remember that I can trust — I can myself to tell a story. I can trust myself to tell this story. I can trust myself to write it. I will never be perfect, and I need to accept that. All I can do is write what I can, right here and now. We’re all just doing the best that we can with what we have. We’re making systems to help us navigate this path that we want to be on. I want to be a writer. I love doing this, and yet, and yet…
(20:15):
I know that a system isn’t necessarily a forever solution, but I’m going to try it, and I’m going to keep trying it, and I’ll adjust it as necessary. But remember, we’re just doing the best we can with what we have available to us. So maybe give yourself a little bit of grace and forgiveness there, too. That’s the part that I’m… I’m always bad about for myself.
(20:40):
So if you find yourself rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, it might be a good idea to journal or have a conversation with a friend about what’s really going on there, and to realize that, just as there is no such thing as a perfect story or a perfect book, there’s also maybe no such thing as overcoming all of your fears. Sometimes you just have to build a system to get around them, to get over them, or to stop yourself from getting in your own way.
(21:11):
I want to say thank you to those of you who are supporting me on Patreon for making today’s episode of the Write Now podcast possible. Folks who donate $5 a month or more are featured here in the end credits of this episode — and so with that, I would like to thank the following people: Regina Calabrese, Laurie, Tiffany Joyner, Whitney McGruder, Mike Tefft, Amber Fratesi, Charmaine Ferreira, Poppy Brown, and Kim. Thank you all so much for your donations to this show. You help to keep this a free and ad-free resource for people all around the world, so thank you so much.
(21:54):
If you would like additional free content, resources, et cetera, all related to a love of reading and writing, you can subscribe to my “Dear Creators” email over on my website. My website is sarah werner.com. — that’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R dot com. You can join one of my weekly write-alongs that I do on Wednesday evenings from 7:00 to 9:00 PM Central, or you can join me and my friend Asa on Thursdays for Speculative Fiction Story Club. You can stream that live over on Twitch or after the fact. I also post those videos on my YouTube, so I’ll have links to those in the show notes for today’s episode; again, this is episode 170.
(22:38):
And with that, this has been episode 170 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to stop rewriting, to pursue your passion, and to write. I’m Sarah Werner, and there will be no more useless rewriting from me.