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Joined: 6/7/2013
Posts: 1356
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Yesterday, Nevena posted a Member Spotlight with Rachel Anne Marks, who's writing and workshopping her YA novel GOLDEN here on Book Country. I loved what Rachel had to say about coming back to the manuscript after spending a year away from it due to health reasons. (What she had to say about this was really interesting and inspiring, check it out if you have a second.) She tossed what she had and rewrote it from page 1.
This is something I actually have a bad habit of doing: starting over again and again and again. I am addicted to how freeing it is! (It does make the writing process incredibly slow if you don't eventually get serious about at least one of these drafts.)
Anyway, I am curious to see if any other writers on BC have done this, and how it felt. Share below! 
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Joined: 8/13/2011
Posts: 272
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Given that I read this while working on the third draft of Crossing The Ice, I'd have to say yes. I've been fighting the opening of that book for a while, on top of re-writing chunks of the plot, so it's not really a huge surprise that I've been redrafting it.
The problem with the first draft was that I'd managed to whack in a unnecessary subplot about trusting some of the characters that I really didn't want and it was so big that replacing it was easier than fixing it. The second draft? That was just too slow.
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Joined: 4/30/2011
Posts: 662
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The original of Hands of Ash was chucked out. I wrote in high school, so you could imagine why. I rewrote all 200k words. Yeah, it took forever, but it was worth it.
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I'm thinking about doing that with The King's Champion, a telling of the Arthurian legends from the POV of Sir Gawaine. Too much of what I have feels stiff, unwieldy, and incompatible with new and better ideas I'm having for the story structure and character arcs.
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Joined: 9/17/2013
Posts: 104
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I wrote a short story once of a bar fight ending in a murder, told from the POV of a witness in the bar. After reading a few comments, I rewrote the story, narrated this time by the killer. Most of the people who read both preferred the latter, so the exercise worked.
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Joined: 6/7/2013
Posts: 1356
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I think we often hold onto our drafts for a long time because seeing the word counts helps us to validate the time spent. But I think it's very productive to throw out and start from scratch if it just feels like it's not the right book.
Interesting to know others feel this way, too!
Lucy
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Joined: 1/21/2013
Posts: 47
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My current project is a from scratch rewrite of something I started in high school. The original was deeply flawed on multiple levels and fixing it would have required rewriting about 90% of it anyway, so a complete rewrite was easily the best option.
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Joined: 1/3/2014
Posts: 3
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I'm doing that right now. I realized a lot of things while writing the first draft - story structure stuff, worldbuilding stuff - one of my characters even changed genders half way through. There's nothing to do but rewrite it. The first draft was an important first step, but it was just a first step.
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When I worked as an editor, the rule of thumb is a revise is at least 30% changed. When I revise, I triple that. My friends joke that I change so much that the story goes from draft one to draft three. I literally change every single word. I, in a way, count that as throwing out a MS and rewriting the story from page one.
I have, however, done the whole thing. With Childhood, the novel I've been working on since I was eleven. I've restarted it over fifty times, changing the story, the characters, everything. I've never seen it as bad. Sometimes a story just doesn't want to be written. Forcing it never got me anywhere, so I just kind of let those stories go until they want work.
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