Yesterday, I was 3800 words in to the short story I started Labor Day weekend, around halfway through and had notes for the rest of it, when I realized I was doing it wrong. The plot was fine, the main character was all right, but the scenes were all wrong, and I had her interacting with the wrong people. Looking at it, I could tell that I couldn’t fix it by revising; I had to scrap the whole thing. I doubt there are two words together in the first draft that I can really use.
So I junked it. I moved the original draft into the “Research” folder in the Scrivener project for the story and started a new draft from scratch. I got more than 1,000 words written today, and probably would have made more progress if I hadn’t started to come down with a godawful headache; luckily, it receded somewhat and I was functional for at least part of the evening. I’m going to try to finish the whole story in a week, the right way this time. We’ll see.
The Unfocused Life 
That happens. but usually, the finished product is much better. I’ve had a couple of novels do that to me. Hurts a lot when it happens at 70,000 words.
Ouch. Jay Lake talked about that in the last episode of I Should Be Writing. Didn’t sound like fun for him, either.
Yeah, I was gonna say, the novel I finished last year? At one point I had 250 mss pgs and had to scrap it and start over. It’s just the nature of the beast.
Yeah, that’s a little worse than 15 pages.
what’s harder is explaining it to the people who just go “well, why don’t you just fix it and finish it then!” some of whom I am married to.
You could always suggest that she read it first…