On cutting Really Good Writing from your manuscript

(Photo credit: boardshots)

I was having a crisis over having to rewrite my entire book the other day and I finally realized that it came down to the realization that I would be tossing out a lot of writing. Not just writing but Really Good Writing. Every other time I’ve had to trash a project and redo it from scratch, it’s been in some rough state where I hadn’t spent nearly as many hours on every word as I did with Mistress Novel’s so called “final” draft. Here I was, about to toss out pages...