A Different Kind of Writing Block

How often do you restart a novel you’ve set aside?

I am an obsessive saver of things when it comes to my writing. I’ve got paper and digital notes all over the place. Most of the time, I date them so that I can have a record of a novel’s progress. Perhaps it’s the historian in me who wants to catalog every step of a process.

I keep abandoned drafts as well, again, both in paper and digital. Sometimes, I return to these fragments and pick them up to see if I can use them. For the ones that get a second life, there’s generally two philosophies on new usage: edit what you wrote or write the entire thing from scratch.

It’s a safe assumption that however long the document has remained unused, you’ve become a better writer. There have been times in which I’ve returned to a piece, read it, and was shocked that my Younger Self thought it was good. Other times I’ve re-read something and nodded my head having been reminded I can string some words together in a nice manner.

I’ve been thinking about this most of this month as my first writing project in 2021 is to restart a novel I’ve set aside more than once. Back in 2013, I wrote the entire novel that summer. It was a bloated affair, but it was complete. In fact, it was the second manuscript I ever completed, but it needed work.

In the past few years, I picked it up and created a 2.0 version but it didn’t pan out either. I had an amalgamated 3.0 version consisting of about 23,000a words and that was what I started with on New Year’s Day 2021. I nipped and tucked, tweaked and expanded the story until I reached about the 19,000-word mark. That’s when things went off the rails.

What the heck had I written? Seriously, Scott, you call that good?

No, it wasn’t. It needed some serious work.

That work was not easy. I had the actual prose printed out in front of me. I had the revised story structure via notecards next to me as well. How to reconcile?

My 5am writing sessions are limited to about 60-70 minutes. I have a hard stop where I put aside the fiction writing in favor of getting ready for the day job. I also don’t return to the fiction until the next day’s 5am writing session.

This particular section tasked me for about four days. Originally, I tried to simply read and edit and add in new words in and around the old words, but that proved too slow. My 2021 brain and writing chops would start going off on tangents I didn’t expect.

That was when I realized the 2021 Writing Brain was taking over. And I let it.

In the end, I ended up rewriting most of the chapter from scratch. It is a much better chapter than before and I’m pretty jazzed about it.

This particular section was a hurdle for me. I kept banging my head on it and it wasn’t until I allowed the skill and experience I acquired in the years since I first wrote the original prose to take over that the hurdle was surpassed.

It was a wonderful relief.

Do you have experiences like this? Do you give way when your more experienced self intuitively knows what to do to fix and old piece you wrote?