“Kill your darlings,” they say. I say, why not just send them on vacation?
Samuel Beckett's Endgame
Here’s a way to ease the decision fatigue while making cuts in your writing, big or small. Make a new document for “Scrap.” Make the filename “[Title of Project] Scrap.” Then every time you cut a wonderful monologue, or a sharp exchange between witty characters, or a heartrending representation of an important part of your childhood, the thing you used to think held the whole play together, you can pretend you’re just trying it without, and you can rest easy it will always be intact in the other file. That you’ll never see again.
But here’s the secret: if you’ve been working on a project for long enough, a lot of the time you can find some great stuff in “Scrap” later that you can salvage and use again, especially once you’ve taken the time to make up a structure that works.
It’s a win-win situation. Make a Scrap file today! You won’t regret it.
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