When not to give up

[hils]

Last month I signed up for a DMBJ Small-Medium Ship exchange. Without going into any details (because it's a secret) I was assigned pretty much the perfect recipient whose interests align with mine perfectly. I started writing pretty much immediately.

I was a good chunk of the way through when I realised something wasn't quite right with the fic. I was happy with the overall concept but it just wasn't clicking with me. I could have started over and tried to figure it out but I pushed through until I had a completed first draft.

Now I'm going through and 'editing' it, but which I mean I have more or less completely re-written the start of it and it's SO MUCH BETTER NOW. I think pushing through to the end of the first draft was a good idea because now I know where the characters need to be at the end.

Normally I'd feel sad about scrapping so many words that I spent time on, but it's definitely the right thing to do. I feel so much better about this fic now.

Anyone else scrapped big chunks of writing and felt good about it?

Comments

[trobadora]

Oh, yeah. I used to be much better at turning out a reasonably clean first draft, but in recent years I've more and more often ended up writing things I then had to rewrite from scratch to get them to actually work/not completely fall flat. It's frustrating and I don't like it, but it beats not writing at all. *g*

[hils]

Yeah, I'm trying not to feel like I wasted time churning out a bunch of words that have now been deleted. It's part of the process, I guess.

[eirenical]

Oh, absolutely. I've scrapped what amount to entire chapters before because they took a story in a direction it shouldn't have gone. I've learned to make my peace with it by saving those sorts of things as 'outtakes' or as side drafts that I can go back and revisit, even if I never use them. And sometimes those discarded bits end up becoming stories in their own right!

I think as writers it's hard sometimes, because we get this idea that every 'sketch' needs to become a finished product in the end. We don't really 'sketch' the way artists do? To stretch our hands or our minds or just to shake the kinks out. So we get attached to every piece of writing we do instead of being able to let it go, because it was never meant to be more than a sketch to get the brain working, if that makes sense? At least that's how it feels for me. ^_^

But I'm glad that you got there in the end, and that the story was better for it! :D I hope your recip loves it! ^_^

[naye]

Yeah! Sometimes it's the best thing you can do. Sometimes it's just an ill-timed action scenes, at other times you realize you're going to have to retool your whole story and so are gonna have to lose 10k and the original concept but it'll make things so much better...! (And then it still feels weird because of the word counting.)

[dancing_serpent]

The last fic I posted. I scrapped a bit over 1,000 words, and it made the whole thing so much better.

[treefrogie84]

I scrapped 80k once, because i started the fic in the wrong place and by the time i got to where I started initially, it had changed so much I couldn't use what I had.

yes, this is why i have a trash document for long fics

[hils]

I think as writers it's hard sometimes, because we get this idea that every 'sketch' needs to become a finished product in the end. We don't really 'sketch' the way artists do? To stretch our hands or our minds or just to shake the kinks out. So we get attached to every piece of writing we do instead of being able to let it go, because it was never meant to be more than a sketch to get the brain working, if that makes sense? At least that's how it feels for me. ^_^

Yes, that's exactly how I feel too!

[hils]

Yeah, it's like I spent time on those words I don't want to just delete them but there's no place for them here.

[hils]

Sometimes that's just what you need to do

[hils]

80k??? Holy shit! I've never even written anything half that long I think I would legit cry

[clevermanka]

All the time! I copypasta into a separate document and most of the time I've been able to use them in some form in the current fic or sometimes a separate one.

[treefrogie84]

I definitely cried. And raged. And tried to bargain. It was a bad weekend. But it needed to be done. (At least I don’t publish as I go, I would have just dropped the fic entirely then)

[dreamy_dragon73]

Absolutely. I have scrapped whole drafts when the story felt like it was off to a false start or was simply going nowhere.

I sometimes throw the scrapped passages into a "to be used later" file, but I rarely come back to them.

Glad it all worked out in the end!

[sunshine304]

I'm glad it's now working for you and you're much happier with it!

Yes, I've had to scrap/rewrite some big chunks, too. Not for the shorter fics I've posted, but I recently threw out quite a bit of something I had writte early on, necause it wasn't flowing well anymore and also only repeating stuff I'd added later on where it fit much more naturally. XD

I was also sad to scrap it because in itself it was okay, but it didn't fit the story well anymore. But what can you do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I've also already decied with my current AU to throw on scene out and make it an extra or something. It's nice enough and adds more background, but I think it won't fit well into the actual story.

[tinny]

Scrapped: yes. Felt good about it: not really. I mean, the end result was surely better, but I still hate throwing stuff away.

Because one of the above comments mentioned artists: the same is true for art. It took me such a long time to make peace with the fact that not everything I create is good. I want to keep all of those not as good results, too.