For the last week I’ve been working on a steampunk novella. The story has no title yet. I had hoped to have it finished by now, but am probably two hard writing days away from the end. It didn’t help that a couple of days ago I had to delete about 2k, words that I had dragged out of myself like I was paying $100 for each and every one. They were decent words, fine for a first draft, but they weren’t going in the right direction. I wasn’t excited about writing the story and had to force myself to sit down.

Then I had the “Eureka” moment (no, not the TV programme, the moment where you go “why didn’t I think of this before?”). With heavy heart I deleted the words and took a different turn. Since then I wrote close to 7k in the last two days and am looking forward to getting back to it. It was the right decision and I am kicking myself I hadn’t thought of it earlier.

The story still needs a lot of work and there are a number of twists I am still working on, but overall it is coming together.

Never be afraid to delete words. I saved the new story in a new document, so the deleted passages still exist.

Have you ever had to delete a whole chunk because you’d gotten stuck on the wrong road?