I accidentally wrote two completely different novels at the same time for six months and only noticed when I tried to describe what I was working on and could not

[u/Alternative_Bike_873]

This one is a little strange to explain but I want to try.

I started a project in spring. Character I believed in, opening that felt right, general sense of where it was going. Wrote consistently for a few months. Somewhere in that period I also started a document for what I told myself was a different project, something smaller, something I was just sketching while the main project developed.

Six months in I had fifty thousand words across two documents and no clear sense of which one was the real project.

They had started as genuinely different things. Different characters, different settings, different tones. But reading back through both of them I found they were asking the same question from different angles. The same preoccupation dressed in different clothes. The same thing I apparently needed to write about badly enough that I had started writing it twice without realizing the repetition.

Tried to explain what I was working on to a friend over dinner and produced something incoherent that combined both projects without meaning to. She asked if I was writing one book or two. I said I was not entirely sure.

Spent the following month reading both documents carefully and trying to understand what they were each doing that the other was not. Eventually merged the best elements of both into something that could not have existed without the strange six month accident that produced them.

The book I am finishing now is better than either version would have been alone and I would not have written it if I had been disciplined enough to stay in one document.