While in Puerto Rico I “rediscovered” my love for The Dreaming Pools, a novel I had worked on last year. Reading through the draft I handy, I was amazed to discover just how good it was, and how close it was to being finished. In point of fact, the first draft was done. Happily this week, following a more than bumpy plane ride, I began work on the second draft.
Then I had a happy discovery that leaves me at an interesting cross roads.
You see, forgotten by my current self, I had already begun this rewrite. Initially, I was intrigued by this “lost” rewrite, because although I think my current rewrite is better written than the original, I find that some of my rewrite matches the same decisions in word choices as my “lost” rewrite. Consciously independent, I’ve chosen to reword some passages in almost the exact same way. Given that this older rewrite feels like it was made by an alternate me, that feels kind of cool in a doppelgänger sort of way.
Then this morning I stumbled across a block of new text. My breath caught as I realized the significance of this block, apparently the last block I wrote before quitting. My last rewrite was incomplete, leaving off with this new text, and I can see why. At some point I had decided that rather than redraft what existed, I needed to rewrite part of the novel from scratch. Same characters, same landmarks, but different stories. And this leaves me a bit torn. I’ve yet to find any notes of where I was headed. They might exist, perhaps in a journal or in a locked file that I haven’t found yet, but since it was me that wrote this, I can recognize at least where I thought I might be going. It was certainly a bolder rewrite, a story with a clear depth that’s missing from the current draft.
And therein lies part of the dilemma. I could continue onward, ignoring the last rewrite attempt, and simply clean up the current draft. Or I could pursue what then-me thought would make for a richer story, certainly making it a larger work than its current, pre-redraft 80K (and yes, its at 80 thousand words now – all it took was a week of tweaking the first few chapters to get it there). Or I can let this new/old information rest in my head for a while and see how much can be salvaged, and how much can be added, to make a cleaner, bolder story.
Half of my fascination here is with the thought of this alternate me coming to the same conclusions, then splitting off in a new direction. The other half is in pursuing where that story might have gone. I think it might be time to outline this out, see where each branch leads, and then make a decision.
[pause] Hmmm, according to this post, I did in fact start a new outline. Need to find it. Later kids, I’m off to pursing my novel while my own kids watch Thundercats!