It's okay to start over

I had a revelation yesterday. (In the shower…sometimes I think I need to install some sort of voice recorder in the shower, because I seem to do all my best thinking in there.)

For some reason I was thinking about a very old work-in-progress of mine, one that I actually finished ages and ages ago but was never satisfied with (seriously, it’s so old that I don’t even have a viable electronic copy of it; I’ve been retyping it into my computer as I revise). About a year ago I started a major revision of it, but something about it still wasn’t working for me. I had a victim friend read the first bits, and although she said she enjoyed the characters and the setup, parts of it were dragging.

She’d articulated something I’d been thinking, too, but I really didn’t put my finger on it until yesterday, when some comments I’d read on Dear Author about cliffhangers sort of merged with comments from a few months ago as to whether people enjoy reading about relationship arcs that take place over the space of several books instead of one.

I’d always imagined my WIP to be the first book in a trilogy, one in which I’d set up a relationship that wouldn’t actually get any resolution until the third book. That does work in some cases, but I’ve just realized that it doesn’t really work in this one, because I now know that it’s not really a coming-of-age story or a finding-your-center story, or any of the other things I might have been contemplating when I first set out to write these books, lo those many decades years ago. It’s the story of how two people who start out at odds (and have a good deal of sexual tension) find a way to work together against a common enemy (it’s a fantasy romance, for those of you who are interested).

Fine and good. What this means, though, is throwing out hundreds of pages of material I’ve already written. I’m sure a lot of writers will read that and wince. No one wants to discard thousands of  words they’ve labored over, but if those words aren’t serving the purpose of the story you really want to tell, then they’ve got to go.

It wasn’t all useless effort, of course. The worldbuilding and the character backgrounds and many other details can be preserved, even if they end up being used in a very different way from the one I’d originally imagined. They can help form the bedrock of the new story, and in the process actually save me from having to start over completely from scratch.

What I’ve realized about tearing the story down to start all over again is that what could be viewed as an act of destruction is actually a re-affirmation of the creative process. It’s telling me that if I feel something isn’t working, there’s usually a good reason why. And when I feel excited about going back to a project that I had just about abandoned, I know I’m on the right track.