Throwing It All Away

I have a 98,000 word novel that took me a year to write: three months for the first draft plus nine months of revision. It's all about to become one of those proverbial darlings that I must kill. Only a handful of people have read it, and no one else ever will.

Say your goodbyes! I'm holding the delete key to its head right now! Here it goes—BANG! It's dead!

All that work, early mornings, late nights, hours pondering and agonizing and wracking my brains while staring at a blank screen—gone in the blink of an eye. Alas, poor book. I knew it well, Horatio. *sob*

Whoa, I'll stop there. Honestly, I'm just trying to make myself feel sorry for myself. Starting an entire book over from the beginning seems like it ought to be a difficult thing to do. It should feel arduous, sacrificial or something besides exciting.

But I'm just excited. I've got a book that still has a lot of things wrong with it, and I'm realizing new things all the time. This a chance to fix everything! Because this book deserves it. When I'm done with this draft (plus probably a couple more passes to fix new problems I may introduce) I'll have a shining gem worthy of the characters I've come to know so well. A couple months ago I wrote that I couldn't quite see my characters faces, and couldn't hold a conversation with them. Now I can do both.

And really, hardly a single hour of the time I've spent writing is wasted. I've been learning how to write, and I can say with sincere Edisonian optimism that I've found a dozen ways not to tell this story. I'm really pumped. This is the draft where the characters come alive on the page the way they have in my mind. This is the draft where the story makes perfect sense and flows inevitably to a better ending. This is the draft that I'll be able to hand to anyone in the world and say without reservation, "I wrote this."

Give me three months from tomorrow.

Oh, and brain-wracking has been minimal.

Comments

  1. shessjensAugust 17, 2010 at 3:27 PM

    Oh my goodness Ben! Are you seriously throwing it all away and starting from scratch?! I guess it's probably a really awesome idea, it's just kind of sad at the same time. I'm sure you'll make it so much the better though--good luck! I'm going to ask you about it, 3 months from Aug 13th, which is....Nov 13th! Ha, you'll be able to enjoy Thanksgiving :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Krista Van DolzerAugust 25, 2010 at 4:22 PM

    Just wanted to let you know that you, uh, won my contest, if you're hanging around here somewhere. Hop on over to check out the details.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No, wait! I like this query better!

And I posted it on this very blog back in October of 2011, before I even started writing The Freezer . For some reason, it's better than any of the four (or five?) queries I've written since then. What do you think? (Yes, you.) THE ORIGINAL, PRE-WRITING PITCH, BACK FROM THE DEAD: The world is about to die a violent death at the hands of a rogue planet. The last escape ships have gone, leaving billions of people knowing the exact date and time of their demise. Society is coming apart at the seams. Violence is spreading. Food is disappearing. There's one month left. Thane Ryder turned down a seat on a spaceship to stay with his six-year-old daughter Mandy, and he intends to make her final days happy. He'll stay in his home and refuse protection. He'll feed his enemies and treat them like friends. He'll plant a garden, clean the house, and teach Mandy to ride a bicycle. He won't pick up a gun or show any of the fear gnawing away at his insides. And ...
Read more

The Writer's Voice

This is part of a blogfest that's part of a contest and it's all explained here . It's run by four popular writer-bloggers and I was lucky to secure slot 149 out of 175. It's a writer-eat-writer world out there. Rawr. Anyway, Drivers: Ash arrives in a foreign country to begin an exciting, high-stakes job. He’s young and inexperienced, but his new employer sought out and recruited him because of one important qualification—Ash is suicidal. He’ll be inside an armed robotic vehicle that’s supposed to be unmanned and autonomous. Ash will ride until the artificial intelligence reaches its limits, and then because his boss oversold the robots’ abilities, he’ll be given control to drive and fire the weapons. It’s meant to be Ash’s last suicide attempt, but he just isn’t any good at dying. He survives the first mission. One other driver also makes it back, a girl named Zephyr. As Ash gets to know her, his perspective changes. There were so many reasons to die, ...
Read more

LDS Writer Blogfest: And a Little Child Shall Lead Them

Hi. This is part of the LDS Writer Blogfest, which means I’m going to talk about my religion again. (I’m Ben. I’m a writer. And I’m a Mormon.) But first, and since this is an LDS Writer Blogfest, let me tell you about the book I recently finished drafting. (Don’t worry. It’s not about religion, nor am I totally hijacking the fest.) The Freezer is set in a hypothetical near-future Earth that’s about to be destroyed by a collision with a rogue planet. There are sub-light-speed interstellar ships and fusion engines, but aside from that, it’s a lot like the world we live in. (Also, that about-to-be-destroyed thing tends to affect the way people think.) I wrote the final chapter the Saturday before last, mere hours before sitting down to watch the annual LDS General Conference on TV. (I missed the first few minutes because I was putting out a fire. Literally.) I joined my wife and three kids, who were already watching, right as Boyd K. Packer started to speak. I knew ...
Read more