Lost To The Cutting Room Floor

So, a funny thing happened to me tonight.

I sat down to write, as I was doing every day, and told myself that I need to, once again, do every day. It's harder to get back into the swing of things than I would have thought, or would have cared to admit. To be totally honest, I wish like hell I hadn't taken that break, hadn't allowed myself to lapse. I suppose it's a good thing that I'm still thinking about the story, not letting it lapse, but man, I had a good thing there. Why did I break that streak?

Anyway, so I've been working for the past week or so since returning to the work after deciding that I wasn't done. And as I was sitting there, thinking about it, reading over what I'd done, well... I realized that it didn't fit. Any of it. The characters weren't acting in a way that made sense, in a way that worked. I introduced a new narrator and realized, after two chapters, that it was a character that better served in her previous role, because she knew far too much to be a narrator. Quite honestly, in a single chapter from her point of view, we'd probably have all the mysteries of the plot worked out. That's just not good.

So, I deleted everything I've done. I decided not to try and salvage any of it, because I didn't like what was happening, didn't like the direction I'd gone. Better to go back to the last point I was proud of, the last moment that I was really certain of, and try again. So, ultimately, that turns out to be a loss of, oh, I'd say 5,000 words or so, which given the fact that I've been going slower than my NaNoWriMo pace, means that I've lost a pretty good chunk of time.

But sometimes it has to be done. Sometimes, not everything is going to work. I'd rather cut whole chapters than dig myself into a hole. You can break a story that way, lose it entirely. I'd rather not have that happen.

So tonight meant moving backwards, moving further away from the finish line in order to find the trail again. But that's okay, because now I have new ideas about things to try. Maybe it'll be awesome and maybe it won't be; maybe the truth is that it's a mistake to try and draw this story out any longer. I'll face that bridge if I ever come to it, but for now, I have a world that I want to continue to play in, and I have characters with a lot of story left to tell.