Cut and Remove

The novel I am working on is coming along very well, in fact I'm ahead of schedule. This is very good as the next couple of weeks are nutty busy with the other side of my life. You know, work, riding club and family. All of which I love. . . but . . .

One of the things that I have happened upon recently was the whole idea of cutting out a massive amount of writing and redoing it. How realistic is that? I asked myself. Would I ever need to do it? At the time I didn't think so until I saw that the second book in my Chronicles series needed to be from a different characters point of view. Which meant that the 30,000 + words I had already written were just. . . practice.

Oh well, it didn't hurt as bad as I thought it would. In fact, I found that the new story is a better plot, better idea than the first one I had. So my piece of advice is this.

Don't be afraid to chop up, remove or otherwise make massive changes to your MS. You may find like me, that the new work with a fresh start is miles ahead of what you first thought was your best idea.