In 2012 wrote an essay about a challenging time in my family when someone dear to me was diagnosed with cancer. And I spent the next three years writing several additional drafts. I hired an editor and shared another version with her. I was simply determined to get it “right”—whatever that meant.

I mean that I wanted to do the experience justice. I wanted to delve into the heartache, the uncertainty, the agony and moments of joy. And I wanted readers to have this same experience as they read the piece.

But I could never say exactly what I wanted to say. Perhaps that is because I was trying to craft something from a time that was very much in-process. I didn’t yet have the perspective I needed in order to say what needed to be said. Sometime during 2016,I put the essay away.

Fast forward to December 2020. I am in bed and I wake to the sound of my husband’s shower. It’s dark outside, the moon etching space around the blinds and suddenly, I begin thinking about death and that fact that someday my loved ones will die. It’s less than 20 degrees outside when I make myself a cup of coffee and sit down at my desk, a fresh pad of paper before me. I don’t think about that old cancer essay, but suddenly that is what I am exploring yet again, but from a greater sense of the past and present.

Writing the piece felt good like slipping on a favorite sweater after a season or three spent in a closet.

All this to say, sometimes it pays to rewrite.

You can take a draft and fine tune the paragraphs. You can rearrange the events, develop a character and heighten the tension, but sometimes it pays to put the whole thing away and rewrite it. What you draft may be fresh and startling and surprise even you.