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I'm currently going back to a 'failed' novel from several years ago. I wrote around 75,000 words of what I had tentatively titled Breach of Faith before I realized that the passion I had for the work was slowly fading and that I didn't really want to finish it -- at the time, I was also writing pieces of what would eventually become Holder of Lightning, and I was far, far more interested in that world.
At that time in my life, I'd been 'let' go' from my previous job, was feeling rather lost and precarious (both financially and probably mentally as well), was looking for other employment and finding nothing that paid remotely close to what I'd been paid before -- for that matter, a couple years shy of a decade later, I'm still not being paid anything close to that salary...
I was in the meantime working on three separate writing projects at one time -- heck, being a 'full-time writer' had been forced upon me, so damn it, I was going to write. Writing on more than one piece at a time was something that's not my usual routine, as my poor little brain has a hard enough time remembering what I'm doing in one world, much less three. I found that as Holder became more and more the world into which I wanted to immerse myself, it was becoming more and more difficult to force myself back into the world of Breach.
Eventually, I just stopped going there at all, and the draft languished in its folder on my hard drive.
Oh, I'd go back and look at the desiccated, truncated body of Breach occasionally, especially after I'd just finished another novel. I'd brush away the cobwebs and the dust from the files and read them again. I loved the beginning of the story, the first 25,000 words or so, but something nagged at me as wrong in the whole set-up, the underlying thematic material, the world... I'd close the folder again, and start on something new.
After finishing A Magic of Dawn in late August, I went back once again to the folder and started reading... and this time I felt a stirring again of the passion that had initially started me working on the piece. I also had a sense that I might know what I needed to do with the novel. I took the RTF files (which I'd written in Nisus Writer Pro) and dumped them into Scrivener, breaking them up into chapter-long files. I started worldbuilding again from scratch, putting together a new location and a new history for the basic beats of the novel, altering all the backstory, taking the novel from a story that was 'soft' science fiction to one that was instead fantasy.
Eventually, I started back in on the old draft chapters... which is what I'm doing now. All the names and places have changed; the world in which the characters live and breathe is different; the technological level is different; the cultures are different. The two main protagonists have changed names but are still recognizably the same, but another main character has changed his entire backstory and yet another (who held a main plot thread in the original Breach) has vanished entirely.
It's strange, taking the shell of old writing and putting it into a new casing. It's hard, taking scenes and (in a couple cases) entire chapters where I love what I'd written and having to cut them out entirely because they no longer fit or are relevant. It's difficult to hit the delete key and I find myself wanting to figure out some way to 'save' the scene. In some ways, revising an old draft this drastically is actually harder than just letting it go entirely and writing new material. The ghosts and shadows of what I'd originally intended settle themselves over my mind and try to take control of my fingers on the keyboard. This is not a process that I, so far, enjoy, because those shadows obscure the words and I'm finding it more difficult than usual to know whether they're any good or not...Right now, the Scrivener file is still titled Breach of Faith, but as soon as I have a better working title, that will change, as I don't think the title's appropriate any longer.
And at some point, relatively soon, I'm going to hit the point where the old draft petered out, and I'll be facing the leap into emptiness, to see if there really is a story I want to tell in this 'new' novel or whether, as with its predecessor, the spark that pulled me into this world has failed once again and left me in darkness.
After all, there are other thoughts and other ideas in my head that are also clamoring for attention, and there is only so much time in which to listen to them and write them -- for it's only in throwing words at paper that a writer can see whether those ideas contain jewels or dross, and whether the desire to tell a tale is strong enough to drive one all the way to "The End."
The only way to find out whether the journey is worth the effort is to set yourself on the road.
At that time in my life, I'd been 'let' go' from my previous job, was feeling rather lost and precarious (both financially and probably mentally as well), was looking for other employment and finding nothing that paid remotely close to what I'd been paid before -- for that matter, a couple years shy of a decade later, I'm still not being paid anything close to that salary...
I was in the meantime working on three separate writing projects at one time -- heck, being a 'full-time writer' had been forced upon me, so damn it, I was going to write. Writing on more than one piece at a time was something that's not my usual routine, as my poor little brain has a hard enough time remembering what I'm doing in one world, much less three. I found that as Holder became more and more the world into which I wanted to immerse myself, it was becoming more and more difficult to force myself back into the world of Breach.
Eventually, I just stopped going there at all, and the draft languished in its folder on my hard drive.
Oh, I'd go back and look at the desiccated, truncated body of Breach occasionally, especially after I'd just finished another novel. I'd brush away the cobwebs and the dust from the files and read them again. I loved the beginning of the story, the first 25,000 words or so, but something nagged at me as wrong in the whole set-up, the underlying thematic material, the world... I'd close the folder again, and start on something new.
After finishing A Magic of Dawn in late August, I went back once again to the folder and started reading... and this time I felt a stirring again of the passion that had initially started me working on the piece. I also had a sense that I might know what I needed to do with the novel. I took the RTF files (which I'd written in Nisus Writer Pro) and dumped them into Scrivener, breaking them up into chapter-long files. I started worldbuilding again from scratch, putting together a new location and a new history for the basic beats of the novel, altering all the backstory, taking the novel from a story that was 'soft' science fiction to one that was instead fantasy.
Eventually, I started back in on the old draft chapters... which is what I'm doing now. All the names and places have changed; the world in which the characters live and breathe is different; the technological level is different; the cultures are different. The two main protagonists have changed names but are still recognizably the same, but another main character has changed his entire backstory and yet another (who held a main plot thread in the original Breach) has vanished entirely.
It's strange, taking the shell of old writing and putting it into a new casing. It's hard, taking scenes and (in a couple cases) entire chapters where I love what I'd written and having to cut them out entirely because they no longer fit or are relevant. It's difficult to hit the delete key and I find myself wanting to figure out some way to 'save' the scene. In some ways, revising an old draft this drastically is actually harder than just letting it go entirely and writing new material. The ghosts and shadows of what I'd originally intended settle themselves over my mind and try to take control of my fingers on the keyboard. This is not a process that I, so far, enjoy, because those shadows obscure the words and I'm finding it more difficult than usual to know whether they're any good or not...Right now, the Scrivener file is still titled Breach of Faith, but as soon as I have a better working title, that will change, as I don't think the title's appropriate any longer.
And at some point, relatively soon, I'm going to hit the point where the old draft petered out, and I'll be facing the leap into emptiness, to see if there really is a story I want to tell in this 'new' novel or whether, as with its predecessor, the spark that pulled me into this world has failed once again and left me in darkness.
After all, there are other thoughts and other ideas in my head that are also clamoring for attention, and there is only so much time in which to listen to them and write them -- for it's only in throwing words at paper that a writer can see whether those ideas contain jewels or dross, and whether the desire to tell a tale is strong enough to drive one all the way to "The End."
The only way to find out whether the journey is worth the effort is to set yourself on the road.
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I'm particular interested in the effect (or lack thereof) of changing the protagonists' names. I've always found that changing the names of characters fundamentally changes them for me--they really become different characters. But you indicate that your protags are "still recognizably the same."
Did you change their names because it would add distance? Did it not add enough? Or did you change them because the world is built differently now, and the names were no longer appropriate?
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