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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35877
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Painful as it is, circumstances like this can warrant writing an entirely new draft from scratch. Your memories of the characters and plot points from the current draft would inform you in such an effort, but you're liable to produce a "greatest hits" rewrite in which those minor characters you like _become_ more major characters.

I had to do this once because, for an experiment, my draft 1 was pantsed instead of being plotted the way my novels usually are. As soon as I finished that draft, I knew it was bad enough (for largely the same reasons as you've encountered) that I'd have to start all over. One might call what I did originally a mistake, but an entire novel-length exploration of my characters is arguably the most detailed plan I could use to plot draft 2. In writing draft 2, I found that:

- Even though much of what had been in draft 1 wasn't revived, draft 2 was substantially longer than draft 1, not shorter, which gives you an idea of how much better I found myself exploring great characters I realised shouldn't be minor;
- Draft 2 also had, in my opinion, a better plot, one that was simpler and yet had more ingenious details under the hood;
- I came away feeling like I couldn't have written such a good draft of that particular story if I'd done it any other way, if only because it was a cat-and-mouse plot and I may have needed draft 1 to get my head around the cleverness of the mouse.

I can't guarantee it would work for you, but you owe it to yourself to at least bullet-point such a hypothetical redraft to see what ideas your existing draft gives you. You're likely to find that your best characters now drive your plot, which is arguably better than designing the plot first, then making your characters fit it.

How can this strategy identify the current sources of plot difficulty? In my experience, it's not so much that I noticed what I'd take out as what I wanted to write a second time. Novels shouldn't avoid complexity; they wouldn't be 50k+ words if they did. "Difficulty" in a plot is more about the way it's complex: too many disconnected ideas not going together well. Good complexity is like a sprawling tree, each branch subdividing a few times; bad complexity is more like a plant whose growth has been restricted by weeds, that also make it harder to see where one plant starts and another ends. Maybe the reason my draft 2 was longer is because the "less" I kept could be better fleshed out that way.

Original score: 5