Revisiting Old Scenes To Write New Ones

A little NaNoWriMo update.

I've been steadily plugging away at this new book I'm attempting. I'm getting the chance to re-read most of Book 1 while I pull directly from it to write this novel, and I really love Book 1 a lot. I've seen some areas for improvement along the way but I still am very smitten with the story. I hope an editor feels much the same way someday.

For this novel, in some cases, I'm writing all brand-new material, some in the present and some in flashbacks. I've been jumping back and forth between past and present tense and that's been a big challenge. All of the books in the series so far are told linearly in present tense. This book is quite different, and I hope that when I sit down to read this book for revisions in a month or two, it'll make sense!

But what I'm really enjoying is rewriting old scenes from a different perspective. For example, I grabbed a scene from Book 1 the other day and copied it over to this new novel, then I deleted pretty much everything but the dialogue. Keeping the dialogue the same, I wrote about the other person's thoughts and feelings during the conversation. Did my heroine, Sanaa, read the other person right? Or did she completely miss the mark? It's been so interesting to explore this other side to the story. Even if nothing comes of this of this little experiment, it's been really good for me to tap into the other characters. This is giving me great ideas for the continuation of my series in the long haul.

Current NaNoWriMo word count: 27,318. I won't hit the 50k mark by the end of the month but it's been great writing this at the same time as my other writing buddies are tackling new projects. I hope yours is going well, too.