We’ve nearly all experienced a time when we were told to cut our writing because it was too long, too wordy, too full of disconnected ideas. If you’re like most people, you know this advice isn’t always easy to implement.
For my money, the tool that best enables strategic and sometimes ruthless cutting is the Fragments File into which I paste everything that I cut from my projects. Typically my Fragments File will be three times longer than any major project.
I have also had clients call this file The Cutting Room Floor, Compost, and The Lonely Sentences File. Whatever you call it, saving rather than deleting it is a game changer. For many people it loosens the anxiety of parting with ideas and sentences they’ve struggled to produce. And it can enable you to see your piece with and without a given sentence, paragraph, or page. Essentially, it allows you to A/B test versions of your writing.
When you become an advanced cutter, you’ll find yourself throwing even perfectly good ideas and paragraphs into your Fragments File because they don’t happen to fit into your current piece.
If you’re doing it right, your Fragments File will become an important source of material for your Writing Backlog.
Here are strategic questions that can help you prune your work.
If your piece is getting too long, does does it have scope creep? Is it doing something other than what you set out to do?
Are you covering your ass by adding every single argument or question you might be asked. Does it all really need to be there?
One test is to ask yourself would this piece work without a given sentence or paragraph? Try it both ways.
Get specific feedback by asking people to read your piece and do only one editing task—putting a line through anything they would cut.
Don’t forget that getting too close to your work is a barrier to editing. Build in time away so that you can come back and see the underlying shape that is waiting when you prune away everything that does not belong.
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