Rework and rewriting can transform your work

Whatever content you're creating, it probably needs reworking before it will really sing. By David Walker.

Great content rarely springs fully-formed from the head of a resident genius or an inspired team. Usually, great work comes out of rework – the process of taking another look at your first draft or your rough cut, and then remaking it.

To make something good, your team has to work on it. To make something great, you have to rework it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them. In editorial content, that means refining, editing and rewriting. These are the bulk of what we do.

Work that seems uncompelling, disappointing and sometimes even hopeless can be transformed in the rework process. The chances are that the need to write in the first place has at least forced you to think more deeply than most about your subject. So you probably have something to say, even if it is different, shorter or narrower than you first believed. Rework can bring it out.

Sometimes, great rework will so change a piece of content that the original author can barely recognise it. The much-admired magazine The Economist regularly reworks its authors’ pieces heavily. How heavily? Its former Australian correspondent, Alan Kohler, once told me of reading half-way through a piece before realising he had written it.

Rework is usually hard work. Sometimes it proceeds line by line; sometimes you axe a section or two. Either way, it usually hurts. You are twisting and sometimes killing things you took effort to bring into the world. You are confronting, again and again, the shortcomings of work you may have hoped to produce effortlessly.

Yet despite its significance, rework remains a semi-secret, underrated by most and mastered only by a few.

At Shorewalker DMS, rework is often a key element of our project. It has produced some of our most delighted clients. So we have tried over the years to understand rework as a process. We've tried to find out as much as possible about how and why rework is successful. We've tried to absorb lessons from Pixar, McKinsey and Stephen King.

Writing clarifies thinking

Writing about ideas should challenge us to improve our ideas, more than to improve our writing. It should make us:

• find new ideas, new contrasts between ideas, new ways of applying ideas  
• frame our ideas better, providing context and setting out problems that need solutions
• assemble and explain the most powerful evidence for our ideas
• focus on the ideas that will really make a difference.

This last point may be the most important. When we write, we must choose the ideas we really want to invest in persuading people about. We must choose what to care about. 

Former McKinsey consultant Ameet Ranadive saw this at work as his team edited, refined and rewrote slide decks for executive teams. "Each week we were producing decks to share with clients. However, I noticed that some of the slides we were creating never made into the client presentation," he wrote later. His colleagues explained what was going on: the process of writing those slides forced McKinsey to decide on the ideas that were really worth putting to clients.

Ranadive's takeaway: "Writing clarifies thinking ... Be prepared to write stuff that doesn’t see the light of day with others".

It's all in the rework

McKinsey is far from alone in recognising rework's central role. Rework courses through every type of creative work, from 15th century Italian painting to today's PowerPoint presentations and TV shows and movies.

Merrill Markoe, head writer for the Letterman TV show, puts it concisely in a tweet. "Everything worth reading is done in the rewrite."

She adds: "My harsh writing advice is this: Write a fast and terrible first draft, then put it down and walk away. Next time you read it, you'll see that all the baloney has risen to the top so you can scoop it off and replace it."

Markoe's point is that rework is not a nice-to-have. It's an essential part of the process. 

"Rework, and rework and rework"

Pete Docter – the director of Pixar's Monsters, Inc., Up, and Inside Out – put it at greater length in a handwritten letter to a boy named Adam. Docter's response is one of our favorite commentaries on the creative process, and all the better for being drawn.

Adam takes up the story (this is extracted from his blog post):  

I sent Pete Docter (the director of Monsters, Inc. and Up) a letter. I told Mr. Docter about how much I admire him, my aspirations for a possible career at Pixar, and I asked if I could get something small signed by him ... Well, this time I got more than I expected. Here is what I received from Pete Docter, one of the most influential and important people at Pixar, the best animation studio on the planet ...

"You are sure right about the importance of a good story in movies," Docter replied. "Unfortunately it's not as easy as it sounds. It takes a lot of work (and rework, and rework and rework) to get it right. And even then quite often we're not 100% pleased ... our films don't get finished, they just get released."

Toy Story: rework creates a business 

Pixar understands the importance of rework better than most. The movie Toy Story made Pixar a household name. Yet its script was in rework for five years before Pixar management were ready to let the computer modellers start creating its images. In that time, Toy Story transformed into a buddy movie about Woody the lovable cowboy doll and Buzz the plastic cartoon astronaut.

But that was not how Toy Story started. The hero of the first draft was Tinny, a one-man band doll; his offsider Woody was a ventriloquist's dummy.

Writers reworked that draft until the Woody character became a doll. But in the rework, he also became the story's villain; he kept the other toys in line with the help of a vicious toy dog, until the other toys ganged up and threw him out the window.

Writers reworked that draft several more times too, seeking to move it from might-have-been-good to great. Eventually the production team hired several skilled outside writers to help them rework it even more. One of these writers was Joss Whedon, now famous for Buffy, Firefly and the Avengers movies, but then a sitcom writer with a reputation for rework success. 

Whedon reworked the Woody-Buzz dialogue, throwing much of it out. He also came up with crucial new ideas, such as Buzz's inability to believe he was a toy.

Note that the work done on Toy Story went well beyond what Merrill Markoe, the Letterman head writer, called "replacing the baloney". Reworked not once but several times, Toy Story always kept its foundational idea: in a world where toys come alive, a group of them face an existential challenge. But within that idea, almost everything changed.

The end result became one of the most acclaimed animated movies of all time, and set Pixar up for many years of success.

And as it grew, Pixar retained a reapplied the lessons learned in Toy Story's rework. 

To make content truly great, we believe, takes commitment to work at finding new ideas and refining old ones. It takes a willingness to write material which never sees the light of day. As Pete Docter advises: "rework, and rework and rework".

Star Wars: rework gets an Oscar

Sometimes the need for rework appears right at the end of the creative process. The 1977 movie Star Wars was a mess when George Lucas screened it for a group of friends – a group which included Steven Spielberg, and Brian De Palma. De Palma helped edit down what had been an interminable opening narrative of moire than 20 sentences on screen.

Bu the really important contribution came from Lucas's then wife, Marcia. An accomplished film editor, she was editing a little movie called Taxi Driver for Martin Scorsese. With that finished she went straight to work rescuing her husband from a career-ending disaster.

Marcia Lucas eliminated, re-cut and re-ordered scene after scene. She even went as far as to artificially manufacture, out of random footage and overdubs, a vital new plot element that did not appear in the shooting script: that the Death Star was about to destroy the Rebel base. Take a look at this (terrific) analysis:

Sure, George Lucas missed out on an Oscar. But the brilliant Marcia Lucas, with her two co-editors, won Best Editing. Don't you just love happy endings?

Cut, cut, cut

If you don’t know how to make a weak of content piece better, here’s the simplest advice: shorten it. Figure out what bits aren’t working, and then, if you can’t make them work, chuck them overboard. The worst thing you can do is to keep a dysfunctional piece of prose because it has some aspect that takes your fancy. Every passage has to communicate clearly. The bits that don’t are like rusted, flat-tired junkers in a car yard: they’re making everything else look bad. Scrap 'em.

(This won't always work for a film, which by convention needs to be a minimum length. But it works fine for writing, YouTube, podcasts and the like.)

Cutting is way, way underrated. One reason is suggested by a 2021 paper in Nature, titled "People systematically overlook subtractive changes". The authors claim that, by default, people opt to improve something with new material, not by taking material away. As a result, they may add unneccessarily to their audience's mental burdens and make their writing less effective.

When you do get rid of your worst work, notice how much better you like what is left. As Stephen King has written, “the effect of judicious cutting is immediate and often amazing”. Timothy Taylor, long-time editor of the prestigious Journal of Economic Perspectives, adds that “for many academic journals, the dialog between authors and editors that determines whether a paper will be published often does not take readers much into account.” You can afford that sort of indulgence in academia, but not in the thought leadership business.

True fact: Hamlet was five hours long before Bill Shakespeare's editor convinced him to cut those soliliquoys down. Well, truish.

The rework opportunity

Rework is not some admission of defeat. It's an important recognition of reality, a sign that you know the road to content success.

Anid it's more than that. Writing and the various forms of multimedia have a wonderful advantage over projects like brain surgery or skyscraper construction: you don't need to get it right the first time. You can keep finding better ideas, better metaphors, better examples, better words. Subject to deadlines, you can redo your work until you've made that work as good as you know how to make it. 

This article is being reworked

Everybody would like to get it right the first time. Professionals understand that this rarely happens. The content you're reading now has already been reworked half a dozen times, and will be reworked again. The same thing probably needs to happen to your content.

And yes, Shorewalker DMS can help with that. Give us a call or drop us an email.

Great work does not simply spring fully-formed from the head of a genius. Most of the time, it goes through a process that consciously moves it from good to great.