One practical matter to remember: even as you hack away all the extra material, even as you edit ruthlessly, there’s no law against saving everything. Most of the time I have an “extra” file in which I dump everything that I edit out. In some cases I just love the way I wrote a certain paragraph, and I’m not ready to give it up completely yet. In other cases I see a phrase or bit of dialogue that may come in handy somewhere else in the story-or in another story altogether. The challenge is figuring out how to file all of it so that I can locate that phrase when, months later, I find the perfect new home for it.
– from “The Soul Tells a Story: Engaging Creativity with Spirituality in the Writing Life” by Vinita Hampton Wright Loyola Press
