txteclipse

Website: Enigmatic Crystal

Posted December 07 2015

I embarked on a complete, nothing-is-sacred, throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater rewrite of my longest fic last year. I hadn't worked on that story since 2010 or so, and in my mind it was, for all intents and purposes, dead. Like, really dead. But then I realized a lot of the characters and themes resonate with me more than anything else I've written, and I decided It Was Time. So I leaped in feet-first.

Now I'm at around the same word count as the original story and still going. Everything is so different! All my characters have changed, the plot's complexity has gone from "pretzel" to "bowl of spaghetti," and I'm having a blast. But in the back of my mind there's still that feeling that nothing I'm writing now is particularly better than before. I know it's not true (looking at one of my old chapters confirms that pretty quickly), but I know what it's like to succumb to writing drudgery and I don't want it to happen again, not with this story especially.

So I guess my response is "great article, I agree with it, but it also depends." I think in a case like mine where the story was pretty much dead anyway, a reboot can't hurt anything. Going back to work on earlier chapters while the story is still in progress, on the other hand? Probably not a good idea. If I've learned anything about writing over the years, it's that sometimes you just have to write.