Editing: How do I know if I need this scene?

Writing is hard, but if you really want to see if you’ve got the steel it takes to be an author, then get into editing your work. Reader feedback and cutting down those pages of words you worked so hard to build can be the toughest thing you ever do to your own ego. Despite the pain, it makes your story so much better.

One of the issues we often run into when editing is length. It turns out for a lot of creatives, writing long is easier than writing with brevity. This is human nature; because of the way we learn to communicate with other humans, we repeat ourselves in order to impress an idea on another person’s memory, and sometimes we say the same thing again, and other times, we just repeat ourselves over and over again.

As the last paragraph shows, that might feel effective to write, but it can get annoying to read.

Every time you edit a scene, you need to ask yourself if your story really needs it. (A scene is usually a sequence of events which ends with some kind of decisive change; something like the detective finds a new clue or the villain steals the McGuffin) You’ll be naturally reluctant to cut the scene - after all, you wrote it, it has that joke you like, and it’s the one where the heroine gets to show off her knife throwing skills - but what happens to your story if it just wasn’t there?

No, really, back up, and imagine your story without that scene. Does the knife throwing pay off later? If the reader doesn’t know your heroine can throw knives, does it affect the story at all? Is the joke funny enough to deserve a whole scene? If you cut the scene, will your beta readers even notice it’s missing?

The best evidence that you’ve written a scene that can’t be cut is that your story won’t work properly with it gone. The knife throwing is a setup that pays off in the final clash with the antagonist. The joke has a tragic counterpoint right before the finale. The reversal or turn at the end of the scene is pivotal to the story and the next several scenes won’t flow right without that moment. That’s when you know you’ve written something integral to the story - and more than that, something that your reader will likely enjoy, because it’s moving the story along in interesting ways.

So, brace yourself, and get out the scalpel, and cut until you’ve taken too much … and then put back only what you have to keep to make your story work.