Started an entry earlier this weekend, and though I liked the writing, it read preachy, so I filed the snippet away. Maybe similar ideas will assume a new form, and a warmer tone, should I revisit them again. Which led me to the question of what exactly happens to a discarded passage. For some reason, in the last four years I never considered alternatives to my approach, which I will explain further below. Having spent a few moments thinking, I recognize I could manage surgical extractions—the outright deletion of material—very differently.

When a sentence or paragraph falls short, I know of three choices. Fix by editing, relocate the tract to where it might work more effectively, or damn the lot to file thirteen. Generally speaking, I have done very well with the right sentence, wrong paragraph theory. Narrative drops out on the page like jigsaw pieces dumped upon the family room floor at Grandma’s house. The trick is snapping like pieces together in a good enough place until the puzzle takes shape, and accept that the most sound arrangement might not happen by accident or after the first, second or third pass. Fair enough. And most who have written fiction for fun or profit understand the importance of blunt force edits: working a page over and over and over, only to change a minor point of punctuation or a single word.

But what of file thirteen, this recycle bin in the sky? I have no compunctions tossing a bit to the wind once it becomes clear it does not benefit the story. Sometimes a sentence is stranded in a manuscript, a little island unto itself. It might be a great line, but to leave it in place weakens its neighbors. Therefore, in such circumstances, it has to die.

Or maybe not.

From the beginning, I have cut with impunity, and no regard of how a stricken line might just be the right sentence in the wrong manuscript. Whoa. Talk about a paradigm shift. Cut a lot of chaff in the last four years, trying to find some wheat. The deletions were done for the right reason, but maybe, just maybe I could have saved those offending lines in another file.

See, it’s the simplest lessons that hit me the hardest.