Remember this post? About having to restart my novel again? I originally said that I was going to keep my prologue and scrap everything else. I'll keep the basic ideas, but I need to flesh them out more and try again.
Well, that was a half-truth. I've actually scrapped half of the prologue as well. I have a brand-new, completely different idea for it and I'm a little excited. I think that using this idea will help introduce the world better and catch the reader's attention.
So right now all I have is the last half of my prologue- and even that needs to be rewritten- and just recently I wrote about four or five pages for a first chapter. I'm going to pause the first chapter for now though and focus on the prologue, to try and beat out the basic ideas for that.
I keep all of my old drafts, so I still refer to the ideas and things that I had before. I could never get rid of those drafts! Although I found one of the early, early drafts that I wrote in notebooks and I'm pleased to announce that after reading some of it, I realised it was horrible! I'm so glad I'm WAY beyond that.
What's that? How many drafts have you gone through, you ask?
I've lost count. And I know I'll go through many more. Writing can be a little depressing like that. An author (John Green, if I remember right) once said something like the story that he had just published was 90% completely different than the original drafts were.
HOLY COW.
But hey, at least I know, right? I think it's easier to accept starting over or rewriting pages or chapters at a time than it is to accept rejection. (Perhaps my thinking will change, I don't know, but for now...)
PS- Still haven't heard whether Hubby's and my short stories were accepted or not into the campus literary journal. I don't even know if they'll tell us if we're rejected... which would almost be worse than being rejected!
