Fan fiction taught me everything I need to know about writing. (Except this: rewriting, drafts, and

ceciliatan says that writing fan fiction teaches you how to do everything except rewrite. hederahelix says she thinks that's dependent upon the writer, which is true to some degree. I think, however, that Cecilia has a great point about the culture of fan fiction. We (I use this term loosely and leave myself out of it) encourage people to post their epics chapter by chapter as they write them. I've always thought this was a bad idea for two reasons: First, for the writer, it means you're stuck with what you have. If you get to chapter 37 and decide that the cat you introduced in chapter 3 needed to be named Alexander instead of Cyrus, tough luck. The cat is now and forevermore named Cyrus. Secondly, for the reader, there's no guarantee that a WiP will ever be finished. How awful is it to get to chapter 87 and then wait and wait and wait in vain for a chapter 88 that never comes? If you're lucky the author will post a note letting you know she's not writing any more of the story so you know not to hope anymore. (You'll notice that I'm making a distinction between WiPs that are posted as they're being written and completed stories that are posted one chapter at a time over a period of days or weeks or months. I dislike those too, but for different reasons.) I can see the counterargument forming in your mind right now: TV shows. Which, yes, true, those go on and on as they're written. You also (usually) get forewarning that they're ending, and you can psych yourself up for it instead of waiting for a story or ending that never comes. For the record, as a general rule, I refuse to read very involved series of books unless the whole series is already published and I can read it all at once. (I say "very involved" because I have no qualms about breaking the rule for fluffy things like the Riley Jensen or Mercy Thompson books.)

Even given how I feel about WiPs and the importance of giving yourself the option to make changes until you're truly ready to post your story, I haven't done that much rewriting in my fan fic career. Polishing, yes, that I've done a lot of. But outright rewriting? Not so much. Probably the closest I've come are the things where I've written more than one version of a beginning, never made a decision what I wanted to do, and never finished the story. (My Mia/Letty with a baby story comes to mind. I think I had three versions of that one going. There's also the original novel where I have two or three versions of the beginning that flow into and repeat each other.) The one I know I rewrote is the train scene in "That Love Thing." The joke that no one but me gets is that I originally wrote the scene from Draco's pov, realized the rest of the story was Harry's pov, and rewrote it. Where Harry loves the woman with the cart, Draco doesn't quite sneer at her. Of course, I couldn't quite resist not sharing that, and I did provide that commentary in an LJ post.

When I took a piece from one of my half-started novels to my writing group, one of the women in my group said something like, "This is a complete scene. In the next draft, start with this and just focus on describing the cabin to us. Then in the next draft, you can add in something else." This was extremely useful rewriting advice that I applied to a different story. I started working my way through football.txt and adding description to the existing scenes and filling in additional scenes so it would have a plot. (I may have already said this before: on first writing, I thought of it as a series of sex scenes with a thin veneer of plot. Upon rereading, I discovered that the veneer was a little too thin, almost to the point of nonexistence.) On the next rewrite, I'll fill in more description on the original scenes, start to fill in description on the new scenes and write in any new new scenes it needs, and so forth and so on.

The Ask: Tracking changes and rewrites.
If you're a rewriter, how do you deal with drafts and versioning? My tendency is to simply save the file with the new changes. Is there any reason I should separate out separate drafts? If so, how many incremental changes add up to a whole new draft? Or should this be like a software version control system where I keep track of all changes all the time?