One of the best things I ever did for my writing life was convince myself that cutting words feels just as good as adding.
When I was first starting out, I had the usual preciousness about my hard-won sentences—each one an irreplicable gem that I couldn’t bear to part with. The drama of the phrase “kill your darlings” felt not at all hyperbolic. But the more sentences I wrote, the more I understood that the vast majority of them were just practice for later, better sentences—and that the same was true for the vast majority of scenes, and even whole chapters and essays. So much of what I put down on the page is just a bridge to the thing I’m actually trying to say—and once I cross that bridge, I can cut it from the document.
But despite learning this lesson over and over again, it’s not what convinced me to relish cuts: what fully converted me was the satisfaction of saving cut material for later, and then actually using it. I know “maybe you’ll use it in something else later” sounds like a platitude writers tell ourselves and each other to make brutal cuts a little easier, and sometimes it is, but sometimes it’s true.
One of the first essays I wrote for First Love included, from its earliest inception, a thread about the Victorian-era phenomenon of romantic friendship—intimate relationships, usually between women, that were as devoted and adoring as any marriage, but didn’t necessarily include sex. The essay was about an obsessive and intimate friendship from my own teen years, and it also included some material about the TV shows Broad City and Grey’s Anatomy, the film Heavenly Creatures, and some psychological studies about gender differences in adolescent friendships. As you might imagine—and as is apparent to me just reading this description now—this was too much to wrangle in a single essay. Revising it felt as unwieldy as carrying a garbage bag full of soup up a steep flight of stairs.
Eventually, just to see what would happen, I cut the studies, and the TV shows, and even the romantic friendship thread—even though it had been the origin of the whole essay, and in some ways felt like its central point. Even though it was one of the first things I was sure would be part of the collection. I’ll admit I was a little pained, and I tried as many tricks as I could think of to make it work before I finally gave in and cut it. But when I tore down the frame I’d built to support the essay while I constructed it, I saw that the story stood on its own. I’d needed all of that material to write the piece, but that didn’t mean the piece needed that material. The essay was so much better once I trimmed away all of the excess that was crowding it, and let it just be about my personal experience (and Heavenly Creatures—I couldn’t cut all of the cultural touchstones!).
I dumped all of excess material (a couple thousand words) into the document I call the compost pile (or sometimes “spare parts”) and left it alone for a while. And when I opened that doc again recently, I discovered the seedlings of a whole new essay—halfway written already, without me ever having to face down the blank page.
Here, published at Elle yesterday, are the results: An essay about Broad City and romantic friendship:
This isn’t the first time the compost pile has proved fertile ground for new work, but each time it happens, it makes it a little easier for me to make cuts in whatever I’m currently working on. You never know what they might grow into later.
PS I’m teaching an essay revision intensive in February! This idea of the compost pile is part of it, plus other ways that I’ve convinced myself (and will try to convince you) that revision is, in fact, the fun part of writing. It’s a single session, three hours over Zoom—bring an essay you’re stuck on, and we’ll tear it down and build it back up together (and maybe plant some seeds for other essays in the process).
This is fantastic! I have a document called "My Darlings" filled with all my cuts. I forget about it at times, but I'm going to go back and see what treasures I can mine.
This is a little different but related to your post; In my law school writing class the professor would assign a topic and the maximum number of words. He would count the words and if you exceeded the limit he would return the paper with one word written thereon: "pithy." That advice has stood the test of time.