As I face the prospect of starting my novel over from the first seven pages, one of the challenges I face is deciding how closely I want to follow in the footpath of what I wrote before. With no backup or hardcopy to go buy, trying to reproduce the same beat and rhythm and dialog from memory could be a bit of a challenge, and end up ringing false and hollow in my own ears.
On the other hand, it could come out improved over that lost first draft.
But what I’m tending to lean toward at the moment is to start fresh from where my surviving pages left off, and go forward to create the plot from a new vision. Like a radically different draft of a solid concept, more than a redo of the same previous pages.
I need to decide and get underway soon, though, or I won’t have a completed draft until the next Cyber Monday following Thanksgiving 2009.
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