Yesterday, I cut 4200 words from my book -- just like that -- to use Tommy Cooper's immortal phrase. I've been doing rewrites of my novel, painstakingly working my way through the notes my agent has given me, some of which concerned the ending of the story. I've been mulling it over during the Christmas break, trying to see how the narrative might work from several different angles, psyching myself up, and then yesterday I picked up the knife / the scissors / the pen / whatever and started slicing. It's a bit like going to the hairdressers and watching with alarm and curiosity as your head is shorn and your hair collects in drifts on the floor around your chair. My book looks rather shorn at the moment, and I'm feeling a bit light-headed.
Although the lost material represent weeks of thinking and working, the cuts I have made are good, they are right, and I'm feeling reckless and bold for having made them - an excellent frame of mind to be in as I contemplate writing a different ending. I've saved the pages in a file and no doubt I shall sift through them before I'm done, so that I can salvage a phrase here and possibly even a paragraph there, but in my heart I've let them go, and it was easier to to than I had imagined.
In my experience of having taught creative writing for a long, long time, people can be a little precious, a little overprotective of their work. It's understandable. You cheat the time to write (at weekends, in the evenings, when others are out having a life) so to jettison anything seems like such a waste, it can feel like sacrilege.
Try and think of editorial notes as a brand new opportunity to be seized and embraced. The cuts I've just made have been purging and invigorating, they've created some space in which I can write new and better stuff, - which I'm about to do, right now.
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