What do you guys tend to do when you've begun your novel down one "path", but envision a better one. More specifically, the first chapter. In my case [apocalyptic setting], I've decided to throw the reader into the action fairly quickly, but going back to it, I would enjoy a different setting and a more peaceful beginning. Do you toss aside your original work? Do you store it? If so, where? Do you work off it and / or edit it?
Never throw anything away. You might go back to it later and like it better, or you might like something you forgot you put in there if you ever reread it. What I do is I start writing what I think would be better, then I sit back and decide which one would be the best. I have a special "Random things" folder where I put alternative chapters, extra things I write about the story, or scenes in someone other then the main character's POV.
Yeah, until I get whatever it is I think may be better written. Then I decide which one I like better. Now, I do sorta break my own rule of "Don't throw anything away" after I decide which one to keep if I am absolutely sure I won't ever want whatever the other thing was that I wrote. Just be very careful about what you throw out. It's better to keep it if you have any inkling that you may use something from the piece in the future than to throw it away and lose it forever.
Begin with the best one you have, but keep your alternative, and press on to finish the story. Once you've managed that, you should have a better perspective on the entire piece and should be better equipped to determine the best start. In revision from the first draft, it might be a totally different start...from a different scene, to using a different POV to relay it to the reader.
Maybe you just need to write something in front of what you already have. Could your opening become scene/chapter 2? With a rather slower scene/chapter 1?
I have absolutely no problem with chucking an original idea and going with another one that works better. What I would caution against is becoming too fixated, TOO EARLY ON, to producing a 'perfect' beginning. Obviously if you sense a total change in direction after writing a few chapters, it does make sense to go back and re-start differently. But until you've finished the story and can see what you've actually got—as opposed to what you reckoned you'd end up with when you began writing it—it's a waste of time to continuously reinvent your start. Finish the story. That's the most important step, really. Nothing you write is set in stone until you publish it. So keep in mind what changes you might like to make, and just keep going. Once you're done, you can rewrite any bits that seem to need it. I have to say, from my own experience, that I made more plot changes to my beginning than to any other portion of my novel. And I made these changes after I'd finished writing the entire first draft. At the time I was writing the story, I thought my beginning was just fine. Inspired. Deathless prose. Intriguing. It wasn't ...and I didn't see that till after I was done. I'm still adding and subtracting some bits, just to tweak the focus, now that I know what the focus should be. Oh, and yes. You definitely should store the stuff you delete—especially if it involves deleted or revamped scenes, chapters, etc. Writing a novel is a crafting process which is usually not linear. It's also a decision-making process. This process includes deciding what to keep and what to remove—and these decisions, often made on impulse, can change from day to day. It's just as possible to screw up while editing as it is to make mistakes during the original writing. Cover your butt with backups and it won't all end in tears.
Seriously - never! I can't tell you how many times I've moved a scene or chapter into my 'Old versions' folder and then later put it back into the manuscript. I think most of us have a wobble at one (or several) point during a project, and start to worry that it isn't good enough / interesting enough / exciting enough. Panic, however mild, can cause very bad decisions. I had such a wobble with my second manuscript. It'd already been thoroughly beta'd and my agent had ok'd it. Then I re-read it, and decided my first chapter was terrible. I rewrote it and sent the new version to my agent. She talked me out of it, telling me she loved the original. We subbed it, and the first piece of feedback we got was an editor saying, "I took a peek at the first page and I'm already hooked. Looking forward to this!" So, yeah... never delete anything.
Absolutely. You wake up on the wrong side of bed, start ditching stuff ...and then later on you think ...hey, this NEW stuff is crap, I want the old stuff back. Nice if it's still there.
If I go back and read something and discover it sucks out loud, I toss it aside, but never away. I store everything on my hard drive. I rarely print anything that will not be shown to others, and little of that since I share most of what I have electronically. The novel I am working on now was started then lost in a hard drive crash. I had to restart is which turned out well, since it turned in a better direction. EDIT: In the current version, now at almost 30k words, I made decisions to change some characters names. I use MS word and the find/replace makes this very easy to do, but you still need to proof read after.
Thank you for the insight everyone! I've successfully restarted, but made sure to keep the rest of my work for later. In fact, I plan to re-use the work in a later chapter as @Francis de Aguilar said!
I delete and throw away stuff all the time. I tend to feel a little bogged down by all my failures around the time to get a new laptop. I don't think there's anything I've ever done that's so great I can't do it again. And chances are things get better on the second go around. I don't know why exactly, but I've always been able to let things go. Do you guys actually go back and reread things you've deleted? When? Why? And then do what? I, perhaps, delete quite a bit more than average. If I tried to save all the writing I toss, it would truly be insane. I no longer have a copy of the first novel (unpublished) I ever wrote let alone the deleted scenes. But that's just me. As for beginnings, I think they are always trickier than they appear. I'm a big fan of having my ducks in order. If the beginnings not right, I've got to fix it up to move forward. I'm making my story up as I write it, but I'm going back to the beginning and cleaning and fixing every 10k words. It's a new system I just sort of came up with and I'm trying out, but I feel like it really works for me and this novel. That being said, I totally agree with @jannert that the ending might not become clear until the end or much later and is bound to be different in some way. Don't get so stuck on the beginning that he holds you back. Perfect is just the wrong word to use while novel writing.
Yes, I've often restored stuff I've cut previously. I don't go back and reread it for pleasure, but occasionally I delete it when I shouldn't, or change it and make it worse. Thank goodness I've kept the originals. Everybody is different of course, but I maintain you're just as apt to make a mistake while editing as you are while writing—especially when your piece is a 200K+ novel. When your work is that large, you really can't afford to dig holes under the foundation. Yet that's easy to do, if you get into the wrong mood. For example you can get into a ruthless I'm having a clear-out mode. You read a bit of the story and think 'I don't need that, do I?' and cut it. But later on you discover that you actually did need it after all. It served a story purpose that you've forgotten about. Cutting it leaves a plot hole. I also often combine a bit of what I've cut to something altogether new. Bits of conversation that I've cut can suddenly come to life in a different part of the story, or are now being said to some other person in the story. And sometimes even a scene or chapter that isn't working will turn out to work very well, if presented someplace else. I remember cutting an entire chapter that detailed a wedding. The decision to get married was very important for my characters' development, but I figured the wedding itself wasn't. In the interests of shortening a very long story, I cut the wedding chapter entirely (even though I liked it) and let the story skip on to what my characters' married life was like afterwards. The beta who read that particular version said, "I was looking forward to seeing them get married. Any chance you could give us a wedding scene?" Well, yes ...as a matter of fact.... Being willing to make drastic cuts and changes is a lot easier to do when you know the original writing has been saved somewhere, and you can get it back if you want to. Most of the time you won't want to, but it's nice to experiment without taking risks. Inadvertently losing work is devastating for most writers, and the angst is made no easier if you have thrown it away yourself.
I always save ideas. If they are not working now, you can always pick them up later and make them better. Sometimes time away from those ideas will help. Another thing you can do is recycle those ideas from older stories, especially if you like the idea of something that is stuck in a story that isn't working as a whole.
