There’s often a disconnect between the Exciting Idea and the Good Start to a novel (or story). As in, you have the Exciting Idea and stand up in a crowded movie theater in the middle of a film and shout “JEBUS CRISTUS THAT’S AN AMAZING IDEA” but when you get home and start working, you suddenly realize you’re 560 words in and this is nothing like the amazing idea. It’s crap.
So, you start over.
I don’t know about you, or other writers, but I save my iterations. I start with a file called AmazeballsNovel.odt and when that fails—as it usually does—I save it as a new file called AmazeballsNovel2.odt and start fresh. It’s not uncommon to have a lot of these false starts littering my hard drive.
I think my personal record is 73. Which means I started a novel 72 times—sometimes writing tens of thousand of words—before getting it right. Or as right as I’ll ever get it, which is not the same thing at all.
AMAZEBALLS IS A FUN WORD
I save these iterations for a couple of reasons. Number one is the same reason I have every email I’ve ever received since 1999: My feverish hoarding brain. The fact is, I’m going to be found dead under a pile of trash someday, because we Somers’ were born to keep everything we’ve ever touched, seen, or experienced. The second reason is because I often raid those older files. Sometimes there’s a line, or a description, or a whole chapter that is Aces (a technical writing term) and so instead of re-creating an ersatz version, I simply go back to a previous iteration and re-use it.
The biggest mistake you can make when trying to get a novel off the ground (and a mistake I’ve made numerous times) is to keep pushing when you know on some level that it hasn’t caught fire yet. Eventually, if you push hard enough, you might get that boulder up the mountain and have so many words committed that you’ll finish the book (at least that’s true for me; I am a sucker for a Fallacy of Sunk Costs in a novel) but it won’t be great. I don’t know about you, but I need to feel a certain sense of loose freedom, an exhilaration in those early chapters that tells me the story is singing and the words are flowing. If I don’t get that, I’ve learned to cut my losses and start over.
Once I get past the first few thousand words, it’s different. A story that goes haywire after the beginning can be saved in multiple ways. The key, for me, is to at least get that beginning going. And sometimes that takes, like, 73 tries.
Something else that takes 73 tries is me waking up in the morning. Whoever invented snooze buttons is a saint.