How to cut huge chunks from your writing

So you’ve discovered that large chunks of your writing are unusable for your assignment. DOH!! How do you bring yourself to delete them?

Don’t delete them; just move them to a different file.

Call it “essay junk” and keep it around, but don’t delete it. That’s your hard work, so it is hard to let go immediately. It might come in handy someday down the line. If anything, years in the future, you may go back to look at it just to see if it was as brilliant as you thought it was. Then, if you find it was really trash, you can delete it happily.

When I learned this trick, my writing quality jumped. Suddenly I didn’t have to keep the crud that was off-topic but too good to delete. Out it went, and new better writing could take its place.

For fiction writers: If you have junk scenes, put them together in a “crazy file” for your own amusement. If you ever have a bad day, you can read back through it and laugh at yourself, then go back and read your successful work with the satisfaction that you know a thing or too about what should go in and what should stay out.