This is the first blog post I wrote from my phone. Let’s see how this goes.
During the editing process for Jasper City one of the first things I did was cut out fluff. There was a lot of fluff. Over 20 thousand words of it. You can imagine how painful that was after so much time spent writing all the fluff.
I’ve always been a packrat. I don’t like throwing things away, especially if they’re things I created. There’s a corner in my closet with a pile of beaten up duct tape purses of my creation that I will never use but perhaps never throw away. The same goes for my writing. Each draft that I’ve completed is sitting on my hard drive.
This is a good thing, because not all that fluff is bad. Much of it contributes to the culture of the city and overall worldbuilding. I plan to save at least one chapter and re-present it as a standalone short story.
So if you’re editing a manuscript and find you don’t have a use for so much filler, don’t get rid of it entirely. You wrote that chapter for a reason, I’m sure, and it still has potential. See if it can be recycled!
As Stephen King says in on writing. ‘Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.’