I'm still in Hillary Mantel mode, mulling over all the things she said in her recent BBC2 interview and discovering nuggets of excellent advice. Amongst them is her revelation that she reckoned on cutting one third of every page that she writes. Think about that! One third of her entire output goes in the bin. I have known inexperienced students in classes I have taught haggling over individual sentences, justifying their importance, and I don't entirely blame them. If your time is precious and you have had to sacrifice something else in order to be able to write, then sweated hard over what you have written, chucking any of it away can be difficult to do. Stories and novels are the offspring of your imagination and it's a terrible thought to inflict what you perceive to be damage on your own literary child.
However, just as parents can be blind to the faults of their sons and daughters, so writers can sometimes be unaware of the weaknesses in their work. If somebody suggests you make a cut, don't hesitate; what's more, look for other bits to snip out too. Stephen King once said that he cuts ten percent from the final draft of any manuscript -- that seems to me to be a minimum requirement. You could put this to the test -- fish out a piece of work you wrote a while ago and reduce it by a tenth. I don't mind betting that the new version will be crisper, more vivid and packed with greater tension.
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