Tuesday, November 24, 2009

And the soup is even better the second day

Word count after 24 days: 43,028

Whew. Okay, feeling better.

I just needed a fresh start. I mean literally, I needed to start over.

Easily I could just finish my 50,000 words and be done with it. Never touch it again. But darn it, poorly crafted plotless snoozer or no, I have come to like my characters. I enjoy spending time with them. (I know, I've gone off the deep end and now choose to spend time with fictional characters for a few hours a day rather than my own family members. However, this might not be as strange as it sounds: The fictional characters always do what I want, whereas the family members can be much more disagreeable. Also whiny.)

So, not ready to give in just yet, today I went to the top of my manuscript and hit enter as many times as it took until I couldn't see any of those horrible sentences I had originally used to begin chapter one. And I started over.

But, of course I am keeping all the old words too, for now. Otherwise I'll never make it to 50,000.

1 comment:

(her name is Torrie) said...

i had a similar experience. as i got to know my characters better i realized the early pages didn't make sense anymore. "they wouldn't say/do that!" so i ended up rewriting the first half.