Writing Advice: Self-Editing Tip #5 - Save for Later

One of the hardest things about self-editing is deleting. A word, a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a scene, a chapter -- doesn't matter how long. You wrote it and you want to keep it. Unfortunately, you can't, not if you want your story to be better.

One of the tricks I've learned to soften the blow is to create a text file of deleted text. Anything over a few sentences, gets copy-and-pasted