Why You Need A Scrap Pile
For anyone who has finished drafting a fiction or nonfiction project, you know that your work is far from over, because up next is the editing phase. This phase consists of everything from the big moves to the small ones. Developmental edits involve everything from adding, rearranging, or deleting lines, paragraphs, and/or scenes. Line editing revolves around sharpening up your prose one line at a time. Proofreading is the curtain call where you clean up any typos, missed punctuation, and so on.
The developmental editing phase is fun because you're constantly like, "Holy shit! I made this thing!", while simultaneously hating your life because you have to turn this Jackson Pollock-style work into Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Yes, yes, both are art, but when it comes to a written work, you need things to be clear. Thus, the developmental editing phase involves a lot of adding, rearranging, and erasing. The adding and the rearranging usually come easily. It might drive you a bit mad because of the ripple effects of your creative decision, but for the most part, it's very similar to the drafting phase.
Please Note: This image was made using Canva’s Text to Image tool on September 24, 2023, using the prompt “Digital artwork of vault with papers with handwriting on them.”
However, when it comes to deleting lines, paragraphs, and scenes, it feels like you've turned into a Sith lord completely consumed by the dark side and bent on hurling the galaxy into utter chaos and destruction. This is normal. It's hard to let go of the words we've labored on for days, months, or even years. We're emotionally attached and while many give the advice of taking emotion out of the equation, let's be honest: That's easier said than done and complete bullshit. Especially when you have a line or description that's a total banger.
“Although deciding to remove a piece of writing you really love from a larger work is tough, the scrap pile makes things a little easier.”
But, for the sake of the work, there will be things you have to delete. The anxiety around deleting something though can be enormous for a number of reasons. One reason, I know I’ve experienced is the knowledge that there are certain lines I would never be able to recreate no matter how hard I tried. This is where the scrap pile comes in. This glorious dumpster fire contains all the lines, paragraphs, and pages from your latest writing project that didn’t make the final cut. Every time I start a project, I always create a scrap pile Word doc because even while I'm drafting I'll sometimes edit out parts of the draft and I don't want to lose something that might be worth working back in or pulled from when it's time to the editing phase. It's like a vault of all the good bad ideas I've had, along with the lines, descriptions, or scenes I really loved.
So, although editing your draft will be tough, the scrap pile makes things a little easier. Just because the scrap didn't make the final cut doesn't mean it isn’t good or can’t be used on a different project. The scrap pile allows you to avoid having to delete your words and lose them completely, giving you the emotional bandwidth to make effective creative decisions as you work through the editing phase of your project.
