About Discarding Text

When this comes to writing, you will never have a good story if you don't, ahem,

cut content.

People don't like this hear this, but a lot of plans and thoughts get scrapped while writing. There's a popular phrase that "writing is rewriting." No plan survives first contact with the enemy. 

In other words, nothing starts off perfect. I'm writing the Glacialane Story, set to debut sometime this May, and roughly speaking, a lot of this is . . . unnecessary. Good is a matter of taste. I could make this just a really long story, but everything would be drawn out, and there's parts and pieces that can be clipped together. 

I know a lot of people who, they get so many ideas and they want them all in. We see movies and don't know how much WASN'T put in the movie. 

Apparently, Guitar Guy from Mad Max: Fury Road has a full backstory despite not having any lines. That was just not something that comes up in the movie, and I believe the director even said that all we saw was the "tip of the iceberg". The entire plotline for Zootopia was famously rewritten. Anyone who's ever seen a pilot episode of a show knows how different they can be from the first real episode. 

However, you're likely the one who cares the most about these characters, settings, and plots, really.

Your audience, probably cares more about the plot. 

There's a reason filler usually gets a bad rap. 99% of the audience is watching for the plot and the characters and world they signed up for. Random one-offs about the village of Swampass can feel like wastes of time. And generally, you should respect the audience's time. One of the greatest reasons I hear people quit 2 trillion word fanfics comes down to "too long" "waste of time" "I did not need to know the bathroom habits of elves" "How is an ogre supposed to fit in only a E-cup?".

Furthermore, if you're going for publishing, publishers lose money if they print more pages. Unlike television where everyone gets a set amount of time per episode and per season ("Oh you only have plot for 18 episodes? Well we want 24, how about you go and showcase some of those fan-favorite characters?") books don't have that "advantage".

Ultimately, you have to discard scenes, passages, or even entire chapters. 

But there's a sense of disappointment in performing such a task. Just because something wasn't important, doesn't mean something wasn't beautiful. If we didn't care about aesthetics or form over function, then none of our houses would be painted, we wouldn't have friezes, nor would we have flying buttresses. However, in those examples, that doesn't hurt the architecture or the function. In fact, in some cases, they even add to the stability. 

In other words, go through your current project. You might need to remove some things to add some value back.