Rewriting The Rich Are Different

While in the post office the oth­er day, a cou­ple of postal work­ers who bought A Real Piece of Work com­pli­ment­ed me on the writ­ing.

“It reads so smooth­ly,” one of them said.

“It seems like it’s effort­less for you,” said anoth­er.

Then they asked what I was up to now. I told them, “Rework­ing the sec­ond book in the series so it reads like the first.”

In fact, yes­ter­day I fin­ished a new revi­sion of the nov­el—The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent—and I was remind­ed of some­thing Michael Crich­ton once said about his own strug­gles with revi­sion. He said, “Books aren’t written—they’re rewritten….It is one of the hard­est things to accept, espe­cial­ly after the sev­enth rewrite hasn’t quite done it.”

I’ve lost count which rewrite of The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent that I’m on, but I’m sure there will be 2–3 more before I’m through.

(Long sigh.)

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

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