New Beginnings

One thing I like about ringing in the New Year is the feeling that I’m somehow starting over. I know it sounds absurd, as the difference between December 31 and January 1 isn’t all that great – life still goes on. But psychologically, it’s a powerful idea to think that you can, in a sense, start over in your life and fix all those ugly mistakes you’ve made in the past.

Writing offers you that same opportunity. For example, you’re working on a piece of short fiction and you’re not at all happy with how things are turning out. It’s very easy to just start over with a clean page (or computer screen) and write the story like you imagined it.

Isn’t that like giving up?
Not exactly. If you give up, it means that you threw the unfinished story into a file with no plans of ever working on it again. I’m talking about starting over. Sometimes a story (or even a novel, poem, article, whatever the case might be) is beyond just a little editing and re-writing a few paragraphs. I’ve done this many times with my own short fiction and even my blog posts.

When do I edit and when do I start over?
That’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself. There are no easy answers to this one. I usually have a bad feeling about a story and know it’s not working out like I want it to. Of course, the farther you get into a story or other piece of work, the harder it is to start over. If you’re almost finished with a 1000-page novel, I doubt you would just drop it and start writing it all over again.

The rule of thumb here is "The earlier, the better". Most of the time, when I have to start over, it is in the very early stages of a piece of writing, so I don’t feel too bad about what I’m doing.

Don’t just write the same thing over again!
Obviously, if you’re re-writing a story (for example), you want to make sure that you get things right the second time around. There are no hard rules here, and again, everyone is different (I know I keep saying that, but it’s true, especially with writing!).

The easiest way to do a total re-write is to pinpoint the problem and concentrate on that. For example, you might not like the setting, or a particular character. Maybe the opening scene of your story isn’t quite right. Try starting the story with a different character in a different setting. Instead of opening with dialogue, open with a brief narrative. The trick is to mix things up enough so you feel like you’re not getting into a rut.

Help! My writing is chiseled into stone!
If your writing is literally set into stone, than you got problems that I can’t help you with. Seriously though, your writing is not set into stone, so you have the freedom and creativity to change it and experiment. Hopefully if you’re writing fiction you enjoy it. That means you should have fun with it and not get too frustrated when things don’t quite go your way.

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