“Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.”

-Coco Chanel

Aside from being a thorn in the side of everyone trying to rock a maximalist aesthetic for the better part of the last century, this is actually a pretty good piece of writing advice. At least, it is for a certain type of writer. But since I happen to be that type of writer, and this is my blog, today is your lucky day! You get to hear me ramble about it.

My first drafts almost always have too much in them. I don’t mean in the way of word count – more in the sense of the story itself. I start off with unnecessarily huge casts of characters, subplots sprawling out across multiple cities for no reason when they could all happen on the same block, and so many different explanations for the main conflict happening at once that they all cancel each other out and nothing makes any sense at all. As a result, my revision process is usually mostly devoted to axing useless subplots or redistributing minor characters’ roles amongst the people in the story who actually matter. It’s a pain.

Today I’d like to suggest you save yourself some of that pain – and give your no-doubt restless inner editor a tiny respite from their vow of silence – by spending your warmup today on a bit of introspection. By this 9^th day of National Novel Writing Month, you probably have a decent amount of your story’s setup, if not all of it, complete. You know your characters and your setting. Your antagonist exists. The conflict is conflicting away. You are now in a position to cast your mind around this landscape of your imagination and begin to ask, does all this really belong here, or could the story function without it?

Now, if you are not the type of writer who jams in millions of unnecessary details into your first drafts, this is going to be an exercise in frustration and anxiety. And for that, I do apologize. If that’s you, I’d like you to reframe this not as an instruction to take something out, but as an opportunity to affirm that everything you’ve written has a place in the narrative. That’s a very positive thing to realize! The rest of you, though – get out your shears. We’re going to do some pruning.

Please get out a piece of paper or a blank word document and write down the following things:

• The names of the characters you would consider to be central to the story, and their relationships to the protagonist
• Every significant ongoing conflict in your story (basically, every plot thread)
• Every place your characters have been, or are going to go (not, like, “the bathroom,” “the living room” – major locations, like cities, planets, or important buildings)

Now I want you to go through that list and ask yourself: why is this thing here?

Don’t bother dwelling too much on the answer. I don’t want you to overthink. For most things, the answer should come pretty easily. But for others, you mind feel your mind sticking. Maybe that one weird side character who’s just kind of ~there~ is really just there because you needed someone to deliver some exposition, and no one else knew anything, and they’ve been awkwardly following the protagonist around ever since. Maybe you’ve got a subplot that seems to center around exactly the same themes as another conflict, and doesn’t really have anything additional to say about them other than to clutter up the narrative and convolute the plot. Perhaps you’ve failed the dreaded Sexy Lamp Test (note, please, that the Sexy Lamp with a Post-It Stuck On is a really common attempt at getting out of this that doesn’t work at all).

Whatever the reason, you may have to embrace the fact that some things just don’t belong in your story. But it’s Nanowrimo! What are you meant to do about this? Your inner editor is supposed to be on vacation right now! Well, you’ve got a few options.

1. Keep writing your story as-is and resolve to make changes in revisions.
2. Keep writing your story but pretend this didn’t happen, leaving a note for yourself in the document that says, “Hi Revision Me, I just did that thought exercise Colleen McCracken recommended, and from this point onward I will be pretending that So-and-So Who Is Useless does not exist.” Move forward accordingly. (This is my favorite option, and the one I recommend.)
3. Make edits now. If you go this route, I’d recommend simply graying out or striking through the parts you want to remove until the month is over. That word count is still fair game! You wrote those words! And you deserve equal credit for the words you wrote five days ago as well as the ones you’re writing now to replace them. You can delete things later. (And I actually recommend saving the things you cut in revisions anyway; you never know when you might realize there’s something in there you can use later on.)

Whatever you decide to do, focus on the positives. Look at how many things you identified that do belong here! Your characters have definable roles in the story – roles only that specific person is capable of filling. Your subplots all weave together to create an intricate, three-dimensional world. Your worldbuilding rocks. And I bet after all that sitting there and thinking about your story and how it all fits together, you’re feeling a lot more motivated to get back to it.

Happy writing!