Helpful advice on saving your scraps.

One of the all-time toughest choices for any business writer is deciding what to leave in your rough draft and what to take out. This vexed me for years. I would waste precious hours trying to decide whether a particular phrase, sentence, or paragraph should stay in my text or go. Finally, I figured out a way to make decision-making easier, and it has sped up my writing ever since.

Create a bucket for scraps at the end of your document.

This is so simple. When I start work on a new document, I draw a big line at the end of the document (like this: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) and label it “SCRAPS”. Then, if there’s something in the document that I’m not sure I like, I just cut it out and paste it into the scraps section. This is much, much easier than deleting text. Why? Because it totally eliminates the worry that I’m going to cut out some sentence or paragraph today and regret it tomorrow.

This has done more than anything to make me a decisive editor.

The scraps bucket works like a charm. Once you’ve got that bucket at the bottom of your page, you suddenly become a ruthless editor of your own writing. You can happily cut, chop, and hack away at your precious sentences without feeling the slightest twinge of remorse. That’s because you’ve tricked yourself into believing that you’re never actually deleting anything – you’re just temporarily moving it from the body of your document to your scraps pile for re-use later.

The biggest surprise in my bucket of scraps.

The real surprise in this whole thing is that once something goes into my scraps section, it almost never comes out. Normally, when I put something in scraps, I think it’s a brilliant sentence that I must use in my document as soon as I find the right place for it. In practice, this almost never happens. When I finally finish editing the document, I delete the scraps section altogether.

What kind of stuff goes into my scraps section?

Great question. I’m going to tackle this in my next blog post, so check back for it. It will help you think about what to look for when cutting the fluff out of your documents. Meanwhile, I’m going to let you take a peak behind the scenes of my own writing efforts by leaving in my scrap section for this article. See below.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX S C R A P S XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

When I was writing this post, I thought it might be interesting to talk about how directors often use their “scraps” (scenes that land on the cutting room floor) to create a “director’s cut”, their own version of a film or TV spot. It seemed like a clever idea. But after I wrote it, I didn’t like it. So it landed on the scrap heap. Here it is:

When I work with directors of TV spots, they often put together a director’s cut of the commercial we’re creating. It’s their chance to go back and edit the commercial to make it the way they would like it if not bound to a strict 30-second time limit. They’ve got all this beautiful footage on the cutting room floor and they want to use it. So they create a version, just for themselves, that’s usually a little longer than the actual TV commercial, but is also funnier or more beautiful or more edgy or something.

Well, I suppose you could take your writing scraps and make a director’s cut of your document: you would have a special version just for you with all the eloquent phrases and wonderful insights that didn’t quite make it into your document. But then again, you probably wouldn’t want to use it.