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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48058
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Starting over is almost always a bad idea, especially on your first project. The same goes with rewriting. It's just like software - don't think starting over will work out better. Finish the book, and refactor. The tempation is always there with any enterprise - just starting over. It's almost always a bad decision, and it tends to make you even more eager to start over the next time - you'll be stuck in a "never finish anything" loop.

There's a few tricks to continue on a project you left for a while. One of my favourites is breaking the thing, going away for a week or two, and coming back. In a book, this would be something like deleting half of the last paragraph (make sure to delete half of the last sentence too - don't end on a period!). When you clear your head a bit and come back in a week, you know where to continue. This should be enough to get your flow started.

Don't worry too much about inconsistencies that come from forgetting what you wanted to do or what you already wrote. That's what the refactoring is for. You'll have plenty of opportunities to re-read your book before it's ready for publishing; keep bookmarks to important things in the story, and make sure _those_ are aligned. The small stuff can be cleaned up later.

I've also had trouble with forgetting the resolution to mysteries. Don't be afraid to rewrite portions of the book to make the mystery solvable! Books are just as flexible as code. If you can't figure the solution out based on what you already wrote, you probably didn't drop enough hints to make the problem solvable for the reader, which is quite important for a good mystery. If _you_ can't figure it out, too many of your readers probably won't be able to either. I've had some wonderful mysteries with wonderful solutions, but they turned out to be too much out there to really work, even with extra hints dropped here and there. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality can afford some extra hardcore mysteries, but that has much to do with the readership, which contains plenty of people who are hardcore into rationality and puzzles :) If you're aiming for a more general audience, don't overdo the hard mysteries.

Don't be afraid to delete whole chapters if they don't work. But if they _do_ work, but need some tweaking, don't delete - tweak. It's too easy to delete everything and start over, but it's almost always a bad idea. If you do it now, what prevents you from doing it over and over again? There's many books that have been continually rewritten over years. Are there any that have been scrapped and started from scratch and actually got finished? (I don't know the answer, but my guess is the former far outnumber the latter)

Not all mysteries are there to be solved. Some may be left for the readers to make their own explanations, without a resolution in the story. Some may be left for the sequels to deal with (though in that case, give yourself detailed notes on what you were intending to do and why - you no longer quite have the luxury of rewriting the past to fit your explanation in the future). Just don't overdo it.

Good luck :)

Original score: 6