5 Novels Whose First Drafts Were Scrapped Entirely

Hungry Ghosts, by Stephen Blackmoore
Blackmoore’s Eric Carter books are among the most popular ongoing urban fantasy series—and with good reason. Gritty, hilarious, and imaginatively plotted, they are a dark delight, and Carter is a fantastic character—flawed, angry, but willing to go through hell (literally) to set things right. After Dead Things came out in 2013 and Broken Souls in 2014, the third novel, Hungry Ghosts, was scheduled for 2015—but never arrived. Blackmoore later posted the honest explanation: he didn’t think the book he’d written was very good, so he’d scrapped the whole thing and started over. The good news? Hungry Ghosts is finally coming out, and it’s damn good.

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
Golding’s classic remains one of the top 10 books to read if you’re in the mood to be depressed about the nature of your fellow man. The first draft of the story was very different, though, laden with an almost comically-overt Christ metaphor. Simon, the good-natured kid who tries to be a civilizing force on the island he and a group of kids are shipwrecked on, has a mystical power in the early drafts, and is able to foresee his own death (which he accepts willingly in order to save the others). He even communes with a mysterious man in the forest who tells him about certain fruits the kids are not allowed to eat. If it sounds like a heavy-handed and clumsy bit of work, Golding agreed, and fixed all that in the rewrite, turning it from a book designed to inspire faith into one that destroys our faith in humanity in the most entertaining way possible.

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
It’s not that often that a rejected first draft gets published, but of course we’re all pretty certain Go Set a Watchman, rejected by publishers and shelved by Lee for most of her life, is the early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. When her publisher read Watchman, he told Lee that the best parts were the flashback’s to Scout’s childhood, so Lee reworked the story to be set during that time. The result was, well, Mockingbird. Go Set a Watchman is now a very useful book for young writers to read in order to see just how transformative the revision process can be.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
James Joyce wasn’t in any hurry to write, and routinely spent years on a single project, choosing every word carefully (or inventing them by the dozens). Stephen Hero was begun in 1904, and by 1905, it was 150,000 words long; Joyce reckoned it was about half-finished. But he never did finish it, and much of that early work is lost—much of it destroyed by the author. The bits and pieces of it that remain evolved into Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen Hero was assembled from unpublished bits and pieces and released alongside explanatory essays and commentary in 1944.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
No one’s absolutely certain that Stevenson burned the first draft of his most famous story, but he claimed he had. He wrote the original while restricted to his bed, suffering from various ailments made worse by the narcotics he was taking for pain. He gave the pages to his wife as he finished them and she returned them with her comments in the margins—comments that must have been pretty harsh, since one day she came into his bedroom and he showed her a pile of ashes and told her he’d burned the draft so he wouldn’t be tempted to reuse any of the inferior writing. He then rewrote it from scratch in a few days.