On Rewrites

Rewrites:

They are the name of the game.  Stories don't spew forth from a pen or a keyboard simply because we have one to tell.  I'm not an artist.  I'm a storyteller.  I may start from nothing, but my canvas is ultimately not the printed page, but the imagination, and I can't touch the imagination.  I can only plant seeds of pictures and ideas.

Each time I write something, or rewrite it, I have a better way of planting that seed, and making it grow in the mind of the reader, but that that is what I mean about me not being an artist.  I cannot show you anything.  I have to make you picture it, and hope that my vision of what something feels like, smells like, or how someone would react fits into your interpretation of those events, or I have failed you, the reader.

Many books fail on that account.  Some people love the way the story unfolds, and others throw the book against the wall, wondering why everybody has to die (I'm looking at you, George R.R. Martin). 

So, when the vision in my head doesn't match the way the words are written, I have to figure out how to fix the problems and try again.  Every book you look at in the bookstore, or on Amazon, or in a friend's house started in a similar way.  Someone had an idea, and then they cultivated the idea, but the product was not an end, it was a seed.