But it’s the best paragraph EVAR!

This morning I was faced with a very hard decision. It wasn’t the kind of decision where I could go one way or the other – I knew what had to be done. It was the kind of decision where I had to just suck up and do it.

I had to cut the better part of two paragraphs from the novel I’m working on. (Pause for gasps and “egad”s.)

You see, recently I decided that to make the story more believable and broaden its possibilities a bit, I had to change the primary location to a larger city. As a result, the amount of travel my main characters have to do is reduced quite a bit.

But at the beginning of Chapter 4, I had this beautiful little narrative where an accused murderer is handcuffed in back of a detective’s car and ruminating about the beauty of the big Montana sky and the rainclouds that he could see in the distance, remembering how they had pattered against his bedroom windows just that morning. It was truly moving – and completely extraneous, since the detectives no longer had to drive him two hours away.

Nixing a well-written paragraph is like holding a baby under water. Uh, so I imagine…. So, I cheat a bit. I hide the baby – I mean, paragraph – in a separate document. Screenwriter John August suggests this technique as a way to reduce the size of overly long scripts:

Look: It’s hard to cut a big chunk of your script, something that may have taken weeks to write. So don’t just hit “delete.” Cut and paste it into a new document, save it, and allow yourself the fiction of believing that in some future script, you’ll be able to use some of it. You won’t, but it will make it less painful.

Of course, I’m not looking to reduce the size of my story at this point (if anything, I feel like it should be longer than it currently is), but the idea is the same. I’ll save the paragraphs in my orphans file, and maybe someday when I’m stuck for something to write, I’ll read through it and it will be the perfect thing to get me going again.

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