Quote:
Originally Posted by rkomar
When I was writing my Master's thesis, I had the hard drive crash and I lost about two or three weeks of work because I hadn't backed anything up. After getting over it, I buckled back down to it and came out with stuff that was actually much better than the original (most likely because I then knew more or less what had to be said).
I've heard that many writers don't make up stories so much as have the characters act them out. I'm not a fiction writer myself, so I'm interested in knowing if that's a one-shot thing or if the same story can be recovered by the author again if, say, their hard drive dies and they lose all they've written. Or, do they get a different story if they try again? Can any writer's here comment on that? I'm just wondering if an author can do better by rewriting a story from scratch rather than leaving it for a few months and re-reading it then, problems and all.
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It probably depends entirely on the writer. I know an author who lost her hard drive and her entire book (third in a series.) She blogged about it and mentioned she'd been having problems with the story and there were things that needed to be worked out. She was confident that she was going to be able to finally rewrite it as a much better story.
I haven't lost an entire manuscript, but I have set them aside for up to a year (or more in the case of my current WIP). When I come back to it, I'm able to "fix" things that I didn't even remember writing. I have struggled with particular scenes to the point where I chucked the entire scene rather than edited it. Sometimes trying to work within the framework you've already written keeps your brain from attacking the problem from a fresh angle. So instead of staring at what I have, I'll block cut it to a different file (just in case) and start over. I have yet to go retrieve a block because what I rewrite with no plan or framework has always come out better. Sometimes there is a line or two that is too good to waste, but that line might not even appear in the rewritten scene.
I have chucked entire short stories and started over. Sometimes it's just not the right time for an idea, or it wasn't meant to be (you can blame the characters for not behaving.)
In any rewrite, one of the temptations is to "save" or just "make this work." It takes a disciplined writer to recognize when to kill entire chapters or even a subplot. But again, it depends on the writer.
I am very character driven in both my reading and writing so to some extent the characters do "write" the story. They grow and change and new characters show up. But because a character cannot change too much -- or it wouldn't be within the bounds of a story -- I think if I rewrote a novel from scratch, that character and its story would stay somewhat the same if I were writing it in the same time frame. Meaning within a year of the lost manuscript.
When I start a new book in a series, I often re-read parts of the other books to get back "into" the character--their expressions, their mannerisms, and that sort of thing.
If one were to lose an entire manuscript with no record of those things for each character, I think only the strongest, most memorable traits would remain in a rewrite. And in that case, perhaps the story would take a different direction because things in my own life might be different. Thus, what I thought was cute and endearing while writing it a year prior, might not be as relevant starting from scratch.
We are what we write. Our mood is important, our experiences are important. When series get "tired" I often think it is because the writer is no longer the person who started the series. I think this is true of any genre, because a long-running series may have been started by a writer in her twenties. If she's still writing it in her forties, it could be very hard to capture the essence of a "still" 20-something protagonist. It could be very hard for the writer to care about the issues or story or characters when in her head, there are other stories to write about 40 year old divorced characters or 40 year old mid-life crisis characters, or children or...you get the idea.
But I think it is very different for each writer out there. What may be difficult for me, might come very easy for someone else.