After losing over eighty pages of a novel I was working on when my hard drive crashed, the temptation as I’ve worked to get started on the book again has been to attempt to reconstruct what I had already written.

The trouble with that approach is like the trouble with caring for flowering trees; it just doesn’t feel right. Flowers should be plants, not on trees; and similarly, my old chapters should be what they were, not the pale imitation they come out being if I try to recreate what I wrote the first time.

No, it’s definitely better to just re-imagine the whole thing, I think, and view it as an opportunity to do a better job the second time around.