From Scott Berkun, ["Lessons from working on the 3rd draft (The Ghost of My Father)"] source
The funny thing is every book I’ve ever written has a moment where I realize how wrong I was. That’s part of the journey of writing. You have to possess a certain madness to believe you can take on something as big and unknown as 300 blank pages and shape it into something other people will want to read. For all of my books there has been a point like this, somewhere late in the middle of the work, where it hasn’t all fallen together yet in the way I want and I naturally wonder if it ever will.
The thing I’ve learned is when any creative work isn’t falling together yet it means something bold has to be done. Usually it’s concision: removing something big to give everything that remains the space it needs to blossom. Sometimes it’s shuffling: changing the order in which things are told. Other times it’s far more subtle, and I need to write a new beginning for the book that has better aim for carving through the rest of the material. For most of my books the first chapter that appears in the published version was written from scratch late in the process, to my dismay each and every time. The original first chapters, as hard as I’d worked on them, no longer fit the book they’d started. Maybe if I fill that shelf, I’ll have enough abandoned first chapters to make a book out of them.