There’s a saying in writing that you have to be able to “kill your babies”.  Which means that sometimes there is a scene or a character that you just love, but it has to go.  It can’t stay in the narrative.  I’ve faced two of those in the past week.  Both times, on the Wild Cards story and on the novel, I wrote a scene or in one case a set up, and in the back of my head a tiny little voice went “Ah, come on!”

It behooves writers to listen to that tiny voice because when your reader or viewer hits that moment it’s not going to be a tiny voice it’s going to be a bull horn going “AH COME ON!!!”  When that happens you’ve lost the audience’s trust and that’s death for a book or a movie.  There is a compact or a contract or a promise that flows between writer and reader/viewer/player and it all rests in trust.  I believe you are going to take me on an adventure and not disappoint me.

The audience gives us money and in return we promise that we’ll play fair.  We won’t tell you the book is one thing and then not deliver.  Now that doesn’t mean we can’t surprise readers, but we can’t violate the promise we make in the beginning and if we are good at our craft we keep reinforcing that promise all the way through the book until we deliver a satisfying conclusion.  We have to be authentic.  A reader can spot inauthenticity from a hundred miles away.  If a writer is just doing romances because they sell and doesn’t actually love that genre 99% of the time that will show.  That’s also a form of cheating your readers

But back to making cuts — this inability on the part of some writers to lose things they love is why Hollywood is so wary of allowing the author of a book to do the screenplay adaptation.  You’ve got to be brutal when adapting.  Keep the theme, the feel, the basic narrative but the exact moves that told the story in prose form may not work in this different medium.  Scenes are cut.  Other scenes are added.  Multiple characters get merged into one or cut out all together.

My advice to anybody starting out in this business is “if it doesn’t feel right it probably isn’t.”  I don’t sit down to write without a detailed outline, but this is one place where I do listen to my hind-brain.