Unfortunate Setback

I have hit some problems in my story. The main one being that the characters did not appear how they were supposed to, so the actions they take seem out of the ordinary for them. This is my first story, after all, so I didn't expect it to be all that good, but it went a bit too far with not-good-ness. I think the best course of action will be to just rewrite the story from chapter 1. The story will remain the same, but the wording and hopefully the atmosphere will be different. Just putting this out there so anyone who was reading the first few chapters understands why it'll take even longer. Also, I'll probably just combine the first few chapters into one since the chapters later on are getting so much longer. I also came up with some better names for the story, since the one I currently have is rather spoilery.