“Several delusions weaken the writer’s resolve to throw away work. If he has read his pages too often, those pages will have a necessary quality, the ring of the inevitable, like poetry known by heart; they will perfectly answer their own familiar rhythms. He will retain them….Sometimes the writer leaves his early chapters in place from gratitude; he cannot contemplate them or read them without feeling again the blessed relief that exalted him when the words first appeared—relief that he was writing anything at all. That beginning served to get him where he was going, after all; surely the reader needs it, too, as groundwork.” – Annie Dillard in The Writing Life.
I feel like this paragraph describes perfectly the way I feel now that I’m going back and editing my story. I’m hesitant to delete anything because I do feel a relieving sense of familiarity when I look back upon the words that I wrote before. I feel like each word, each phrase is so much a part of my story that I really don’t want to change it. However, Annie Dillard definitely advocates for mercilessly editing a story—“How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer personally?” These metaphors really hit home for me, especially the one about removing the price tag on presents—I think Annie Dillard strikes a good point here that sometimes what we the author think is necessary to keep in the story may not be necessary for the reader, and may instead be distractingly superfluous. I will keep these words in mind as I struggle with editing my story and deciding what to keep and what to delete.
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