Flashback Fridays #8

Posted byscottatirrellPosted inLife, Writing journeyTags:, , , , , , , , , , , ,

This week’s Flashback Friday comes from June 7, 2020, and I chose it because I still need the reminder.

When writers first begin, every sentence feels precious. We polish, protect, and defend words simply because we suffered to put them on the page. Cutting them can feel less like editing and more like destroying evidence that the work mattered.

Six years later, I have scrapped thousands of pages. I have removed chapters, abandoned manuscripts, and started entire novels again. At first, I saved everything, convinced I might someday return to those lost paragraphs. I rarely did.

Eventually, I learned that the discarded words were not the story. They were only the tools I used while trying to find it.

That does not mean cutting has become easy. I still hold on too long. I still mistake effort for value and occasionally force a passage to remain because I love the language, even when the book no longer needs it.

So this old post remains good advice—especially for the person who wrote it.

Words should serve the story.

The story should never be forced to serve the words.

Cheers!

Realism to Expressionism

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Published by scottatirrell

Scott Austin Tirrell writes dark fantasy because apparently the real world doesn't contain enough dead people, ruined faiths, and gods with questionable motives. Most of his stories take place in Lucardia, a world with a long memory and a rather serious problem with its dead. Its people have been taught many comforting things about history, religion, power, and what happens when the reaper’s sickle swings. Unfortunately, much of it is wrong. Scott is less interested in heroes than in complicated people who stumble into mysteries they probably should have left alone—and then have to live with what they find. When he isn’t writing, Scott wanders old cemeteries in search of character names and thinks about fictional people as though they have personally inconvenienced him. He lives near Boston with his wife and maintains a healthy distrust of ravens.

2 thoughts on “Flashback Fridays #8”

  1. In art school we called it “murdering our darlings”…. but in a painting the sections one paints over cannot be easily retrieved. Which maybe makes it easier to let go when they are gone…

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    1. Yes. I’ve stopped saving the areas I cut. It forces me to be absolutely sure that it is not working. The last thing I recall saving that I cut was several chapters that were originally in Koen. In those, the wound Koen receives from the bone crab festers, and he passes out, forcing Erikini to save him. He then runs into Astros and eventually Sylvanus on his journey. In the first pass of the first draft, I realized that they didn’t push the story forward at all–it was a diversion. I cut those chapters, and you wouldn’t even know they were there. I had to do very little, if any, fixing after they were gone. At the time, it was a difficult choice, as those chapters took me weeks of work, but now, I don’t miss them at all.

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