Tonight I'm working on an essay that has been through two rounds of intense editing from the very highest echelon of professional editors.
They keep cutting things I wrote. Like whole sentences. A paragraph, even.
Like WTF?
@ct_bergstrom I remember some professional writer talking about how you have to look at your favorite sentences in particular. Often these have odd phrasing, don't fit into the flow of the whole thing, or really aren't as cool as you think, but you have grown really attached them. I kept an eye on this phenomenon and I do it and my colleagues do it in their writing. When doing edits it's usually the first thing to go and still people try to bring it back ;-)
@ct_bergstrom @betschart I'm a freelance writer, and often I go back and re-order words and sentences. Sometimes a sentence stuck toward the end sounds better at the beginning. I learned not to become attached to any specific sentence a long time ago. Editors often have their own tastes.
@MelonDC @ct_bergstrom @betschart I don't write professionally, but I still do this a lot. I start with writing what I want to be said, then I look at ordering of ideas, then I look at phrasing, and start rewriting until I think it would be clear to my intended audience.
"Kill your darlings", as they say
“Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”
(quoting a college tutor)
James Boswell • Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) 30 April 1773
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191843730.001.0001/q-oro-ed5-00005955
@betschart @ct_bergstrom I've heard that phrased as "Kill your darlings." Some people save their murdered darlings in special files that they go to for inspiration later on. Useful if the text snippet is going on a tangent. Later on you can develop it into a full-fledged feature if it holds up.
@mjausson @ct_bergstrom I like the spirit of "Kill your darlings". It's hard, but it really works well.
@betschart That’s advice I hadn’t heard before and it’s so good!