This is not so much a 'What should I do?' question, as I've already made up my mind, but I would be interested in hearing what others would do in the same situation. At approx 10,000 words into the first draft of my novel it suddenly hit me that the characters' motives didn't really make sense. I was so caught up in the fact I finally seemed to be combating my chronic under-writing habits that it never even occurred to me. So, I sat down and began brain-storming a solution and finally - with some help (thanks, if you're reading) - I sketched out a few changes. I had feared I would lose most of what I'd written so far, but thankfully managed to keep the basic premise. This change in direction will require heavy rewrites of many already-written scenes, and therein lies the quandary. As I say, I've already made a decision (I will be rewriting the current 10,000 words before I pick up the story) but how many of you, working on the 'vomit through the first draft' method, would just continue writing (albeit in the new direction) and worry about the re-write later?
I would rewrite, but I'm not in the first-draft-quickly category, so I'm not a good data point. I might rewrite only important scenes and add notes for a later rewrite of less important scenes, but since this is about character and motivation rather than, say, moving the setting from Louisiana to New York, I'd probably do all the rewrites.
Even as someone who falls more on the "do a first draft then edit" side of the spectrum, I'd still probably rewrite. Because, to me, "do a first draft then edit" means write the correct story, then clean it up. A broken first draft is not a finished first draft in my process. Although, I've yet to have a story change so much that it needed rewriting, except within the first few thousand words where the effort is fairly minimal. Maybe that's the planner in me.
It's only 10,000 words If you're certain that you need to make that change, just do it. It won't take long. I was at least twice that far into my last-but-one novel when I realized I needed to change the main female character from the protagonist's girlfriend into a transgendered hooker. Took an evening to fix up what I'd done, and I didn't have to write the rest of the book and then hope I could go back and paper over the joins early on.
Same here I'm constantly rewriting my drafts-in-progress when I come up with new and better directions.
10,000 words is not a lot. However, this is one of the reasons we write stories instead of just thinking about them. Once the words are down our ideas change. This is exactly what happened to you and there's no reason to assume this won't happen again, maybe even several times. The "vomit method" assumes that you will make substantial changes to your story in later drafts, and is therefore primarily focused with getting some form of the story down in first draft, so that you will better be able to see those changes you feel you need to make.
If it was me (and it has been), I'd get the re-write out of the way so there would be less to clean up later. The more words to sift through to make the change consistent, the more chance of overlooking something. This way I could make the change quickly, shout "Moving on!" in my head, and get back into the flow again.
I would vote for a re-write first too. Otherwise I'd be afraid I'd have another epiphany in the first half that would make me want to change something in the second half, and one could potentially get caught in an infinite loop or re-writing that way.
Eh, I'm having to rewrite about 25k of my 'finished' wip (cut off ~19, definitely putting more back in than I took out). Rewrites don't bother me too much. I knew I'd have to redo some of what I had as I went along, and I just rolled with the new version of events to minimize the damage. Admittedly I didn't know it'd be quite so much, but I think I still made my best choice at the time. It was more important to just puke them words on out.
I made a note about my changes when I was writing my novel, finished writing it, and then went back and rewrote the first five chapters.
At last for me, rewriting sections go much faster the more completed drafts you have. It's sort of like being a time traveler who goes back to the past. You KNOW what's going to happen. You have an awareness that the you who was working on that section before the first draft was completed doesn't have. Compared to that guy, you're Superman. You can jump back and forth across the landscape that is your written draft, fix chapters in mere hours
Personally, it would depend on how I was feeling when that happened. If I was on a roll and decided I needed a change, I'd just write a note for myself at that point in the draft and put something similar in my plotting folder, then keep going with the changes in mind hoping it wouldn't mess up my rhythm too much. If I was genuinely stuck and all my writing came to a standstill because I needed to figure this out, then I'd go back and fix it hoping to get a flow to my work as I went.
That was my dilemma. I was on a flow, and me being on a flow is as rare as the proverbial rocking horse manure. Anyway, it's done now. I probably lost a couple of thousand words in the process, which is rather annoying for someone who already under-writes, but they became surplus to requirements.
I, too, am generally of the "get the first draft done before doing serious revision" camp, but then the great thing about writing, particularly writing habits, is that there are few if any rules that you can't break when you need to. Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that if you know that something just doesn't work, it's best to tackle it sooner rather than later. In the long run, it means less revising to do. In my current WIP - now with an editor for review after two drafts and some beta-reads - I realized a few times during the first draft that I was drifting off-course or that something I'd written wasn't letting me go where I needed to go, so I stopped and went back and corrected. I didn't worry about losing forward momentum because the changes were actually driving me forward. I was also probably more inclined to stop and correct because I was writing in a new (for me) genre.
