Scraping current MS

This happened to me too. I tried to write in the first person and realized I was really really bad at it. i thought I could redo the story, but it turned out to be a disaster, so i scrapped it and started again.

Has anyone else ever found themselves in a situation where completely redoing it was a better choice than trying to fix what was there?

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That's me, and it was the best thing for the book--and I redid it not once but three times!

I was on the fence about viewpoint for my book. Third is what I normally write in, and I don't particularly care much for first. But first was what the majority of the books in the genre are in. I started it in third person, but fifty pages in, it was obvious the viewpoint wasn't working--though I couldn't pin down why.

I signed up for a viewpoint workshop at the time to see if it would help me solve the problem. We did a section on first person, and I thought to try it. Wrote fifty pages. It was awful. The main character tends to be annoying, and first person's intimacy really brought it out. It also created a nightmare with the very complicated backstory where the viewpoint greatly limited me. I ended up doing info dump after info dump after info dump.

Then the workshop went on to the omniscient viewpoint section, and I tried omniscient. That made me start asking if omniscient was right for the story. The very things that is touted as being bad about omniscient (i.e., distance, outside narrator, less intimate) are the things that turned out to be right for my story. So I went back and started from scratch for the third time, and the story finally started to work.

a viewpoint workshop sound really cool. I wish I had something like that around here!

Well, I didn't redo the viewpoint. I redid the whole book.

My first draft of Secret October was 101k words. Once I finished, I let it sit for a few days and then started reading it. And I hated it. It wasn't the story I wanted to tell at all. I had a few moments of real horror and an overwhelming sense of what the hell do I do now?

Then I thought about it and thought about it and realized that by being afraid of the story getting too dark, I made it light and airy and it wasn't a light and airy story. So, I started from the beginning and salvaged what I could and rewrote the rest. The second draft is about 80k and about 70k is all brand new and the other 10k heavily reworked. It bears little resemblance to the first draft and I don't even think of it as a draft, I think of it as SO version 2. It's dark, really dark, but it's the story that I wanted to tell and it's so much better.

I never scrape my manuscripts. I don't know what I might get under my fingernails.

I've thrown out three manuscripts, ranging from about 50,000 words to 80,000 words. It's disheartening, but a writer has to be prepared to throw their hard work out, whether it be one sentence or an entire piece.

When I got halfway through my last novel I realised it was so fundamentally flawed that there was no point continuing. I did a detailed postmortem, identifying exactly where the problems were and what parts of the story I could ditch, and then I ripped it up and started over using some of the same elements. And I'm very happy I did. I feel like I have a big-picture understanding of the novel that comes from stripping it down and building it back up again.

Put it down, step away for a day or two, let your mind restart. Allow yourself a few breaths. Perhaps you are looking at the problem as being the whole things; just maybe the issue is one or two things you aren't seeing clearly.

If you have patience, words will come.

Take heart from Robyn Young's experience here (2nd question down - how long did it take):
http://www.robynyoung.com/qa.html

I throw nothing "out". I store it all to cannibalize for other things.

I had a story once where I originally wrote it in 1st person, and then changed it all to third-person, and then eventually changed it back to 1st person because I suck at the ole third-person. It was sort of like if you put a phrase into the Google translator and translate it to Vietnamese or whatever-the-hell, and then translate it back to English, and it ends up being completely different than what it originally was. So, needless to say, my story ended up reading like Eragon as told by a German guy with terrible English.

I had to scrap the whole thing and move on to another project.

Yeah, I've done it. First novel didn't seem right in 3rd person so I jumped to 1st person and boom it worked.

Now I am finally getting back to 3rd person for one of my newer novels.

It's all part of the growth process. To be able to accept the fact that something you're writing isn't working is a big step.

Yeah I was confused; scraping vs. scrapping. LOL

I never delete all of something. Who knows- it could be helpful in writing something ELSE.

Funny you should ask. I spent the weekend trying to decide wheather to scrap or rewrite. I chose to rewrite. The reason? I want to make it work any way I can. I put it up for crit. When i saw how bad it was my first choice was to scrap it. Then the more I thought about it the more I wanted to rewrite it and see if I could take what the critters said and learn from the experience. The advice I got was so rock solid that it challenged me to try again. Will it work? Who knows. But at least I can try. Good luck on whatever you choose.
jane