When to Scrap it and When to Fix it

In the middle of revising my Arthur novel, I came to a crossroads - should I fix what I’ve written or do I scrap it and rewrite?

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This is also known as "does it suck so much that I can't salvage anything from what I've already written?" And for me, the answer was a resounding YES.

Let me define what I mean: Fixing means rewriting what I’ve already written, but making it all better. Scrapping and rewriting means throwing sections in the garbage and making something BRAND NEW.
The mean reason I came to this crossroads? Because what I had written sucked. It was awful, terrible dribbel. Because it was a first draft and they usually SUCK. Up until this point in my novel, I had been able to fix everything. These scenes had potential and they made sense in the scale of my story, but I made them BETTER. 

Then I came to the middle. That’s when it all changed.

The amount of time I spent fixing and reorganizing this section became overwhelming. Too much was moving around, too much was being merged with other scenes, too much was simply being deleted (goodbye darlings) and I began to lose focus on where I wanted the story to go.

I began to DREAD writing, knowing how much work I was about to put into something that was being torn apart piece by piece. I wanted to give up, call it quits, say that this story was just too broken.

Then I had that thought that crosses every writer’s mind. What if I just delete all of it and rewrite it without worrying about restructuring or copying and pasting or improving on terrible writing/dialogue/characters. The more and more I thought about it, the more and more this idea made me excited to write again.

So I did it, I deleted 20,000 words. That’s about 50 pages, folks. That’s a lot.

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Note: When I say “deleted” what I really mean is that I moved it to a ‘deleted’ folder - I try to not actually delete anything, just in case I actually want to use it down the road :)

But, before I hit that delete button, I did a couple of things to prepare for my re-write.

1. I reread everything I was about to delete.
2. I pulled out the important POINTS. No verbatim sentences. Just concepts.
3. I reorganized how the structure of this section should go and let me tell you, it turned out to be COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the original

Then I wrote it all again without looking at the original. Not even once.

This allowed me to keep the aspects of my first draft which were good, but not the structure, the arcs, the dialogue, the scenes, or anything else that was dragging my story down. It was new and improved and sucked only a little. :)

I’m currently nearing the end of my Arthur revisions and I already know I’m going to have to do this again. Deleting entire sections of a story is a difficult decision to make, but if the story becomes too difficult to maneuver through, it might just be the best option.

Good luck to any other revision-ers out there!!!

Credit: Unsplash, Alyssa Smith