This is what my brain looked like after I deleted the 54,000 word manuscript I’ve been working on. That’s about a first draft’s worth of story. Or (doing a quick, back of the envelope calculation), about half of a 100,000 word book.
It’s a lot of work any way you look at it and now it’s gone.
(Okay, so I didn’t actually delete–delete it. I moved it to my archives folder from which it has very little chance of ever seeing the light of my laptop screen again.)
Why?
Short answer: because it wasn’t good.
Long answer: because it wasn’t good enough.
It made me laugh. It made me cry. It had some awesome scenes and I had the chance to share about 6 months of my life with a handful of great characters, but it was built on a faulty foundation. I tried to fix it. I really did. (Trust me, because who wants to re-imagine an entire novel?) But turns out, it’s not fixable. And, more importantly, my deadline is not movable.
My sins were two. First, I buried my premise too far beneath the story. The hook I came up with became secondary to the plot. Second, I let what was the current news cycle hijack my story. So that’s that.
Now, I’m trying to forget what I did before, open the concept up to a new cast of characters, and tune in to what they’re doing and saying. Cross your fingers and wish me luck because what I just did was either really brave or incredibly stupid.
Let’s go with brave.
Yeah. Let’s go with that.