The Cutting Room Floor

When successful writers offer advice about the revision process, often they urge that you “kill your darlings”—in other words, cut even the sentences you like best if they are not necessary. This can be difficult advice to take, and agonizing over the death of phrases long toiled over can make the revision process both longer and more painful than necessary. 

My unoriginal solution to this problem is to create a document I call the “cutting room floor.” While revising, the cutting room floor collects all the sentences and paragraphs and entire sections that are not doing useful work in the piece of writing. This makes the process of removal and revision much faster. The reason, I think, has to do with psychological safety. The extraneous material disappears from the piece of writing, but—unlike deleted text—can be restored later. 

An additional benefit to the cutting room floor is that, especially with longer writing projects, it can be mined for material to use in shorter pieces. The paragraph or section based on a particularly interesting but tangential research finding that you tried to shoehorn into the book manuscript deserves its own article anyway.