Late last year, I was 60-70 thousand words deep in a novel when another project appeared.
Without getting into details, I switched gears to work on the new project. That was almost 5 months ago. Now that the project is out with CP’s, I’ve been able to go back to the novel I put on the back burner.
Sidebar – I say back burner because the story wouldn’t stay quiet. It continued to simmer while I worked on other things.
Right away, the question hit me: Where do I begin? Do I try and pick right up where I left off? Do I review the outline, then try to pick up the story again? Neither of those options felt right, but I’d never interrupted a novel before, so this is unexplored territory for me.
What I ended up doing was going back to Page 1 and I began reading. I made some changes along the way, so this is starting to feel like an editing pass – or will until I get to the point where I’ve got to start writing the story again, but this feels like a proper approach.
Additionally, the re-read has sparked ideas that I’ll be able to implement later on.
Is this the way I plan on doing it from now on? I’m not sure. Every project is different and I certainly don’t anticipate this happening again but, you never can tell.
And if it does happen again and this turns out to not be the right approach this time around, that’s ok too. I’ll find something that works and do that.
Thanks for reading.
Be safe out there. Be Excellent to Each other.
I’ll see you on Thursday.
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