Snip! Snip! Cutting out a lot of what you've written.

I have done it several times i find things that are complete crap so i take them out.

or i find small things that are awful so i remove them or i fix them if they are fixable.

if not i take it out and replace it with something better i think the hardest part of writing it the editing process.

Because in that process you find things that you might really don't like and have to fix them.

Or you find things that you really like but they need to be removed or they need to be changed.

 

Having just finished The Windup Girl and The Doubt Factory by the same author, Paolo Bacigalupi, I'd say those books are a classic example of what you speak of.

The Windup Girl was an award winning sci-fi, people rave about. And after I got into it, I did enjoy it. But The Doubt Factory was just a very fun read (for me anyway). I'd be ecstatic if my story ends up as enjoyable as The Doubt Factory.

 

I don't know anywhere near enough about literature as you do, but I'm surprised to hear this. I always thought of Tolkien as a deeper writer than that.

From Sparknotes:

Perhaps there was allegory there under the surface that Tolkien just didn't admit to. Or maybe though it was unintentional by the author, the readers still identified with it.

 

The Hobbit started when Tolkien was bored as all hell marking student's work, so bored that for no reason he grabbed a blank sheet of paper and wrote 'In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit'. This is according to Christopher Tolkien's introduction to the book. Then a few years down the line he used this 'Hobbit', what ever it was (it has always struck me that Hobbits are essentially child-like) to tell his children fun adventure stories. They ended up being written down and thus the episodic structure of the book. I think this way of composing The Hobbit says a lot how Tolkien thought of it.

The Hobbit is very rich in allusions, particularly Anglo-Saxon poetry, and you certainly can read it as a 'coming of age story', a bildungsroman. That seems more than easy to accept, the fact they started as oral children's stories seems to demand that - maybe even Tolkien was in some way influenced by his experiences during WW1, it's not a crazy idea. Reading the book knowing that the first hearers were an academic's clever children - it's very clear to me he started with some vague destination but made it up as he went along - and the tone and sly winking jokes to the audience make good sense.

But, and this is what I was getting at, ideas beyond that I don't find much credit for. Literary Theory gets pretty silly, I'm not a fan of using it for the sake of using it. Like. That it's a socialist allegory, and Smaug is a metaphor for wealthy capitalists. Or the idea that Bilbo is a homosexual figure, an effeminate guy going to romp it in the woods with a load of bigger, tougher men. Things like that make me think 'Hang on, it IS just a story for children'. You can read the book in those ways, if you really want to, but I don't think that was what was intended. I think such readings say more about the theory than the book.

The idea that it's about Bilbo learning about the dangerous, adult world is hard to contest, and you need to be brave and stand up to what scares you - yes, it makes a lot of sense. I think it is open to question if the bildungsroman aspect of the novel was consciously something Tolkien thought about - I think that's inherent in writing a children's story about an adventure, and can come out pretty naturally, but anything more than that and I start to disagree.

 

That's the kind of stories we should all tell our children.

 

That's exactly my method of writing as well. Even down to chapter length. Are we twins?

I did find that it was a lot easier to cut big hunks from my story after I'd let it sit a good long while. A long while. If I've just written a scene, it still has relevance to me, and I don't see that it doesn't actually fit till much MUCH later. So I let my novel sit, virtually untouched, for 5 years after I finished the first draft. I did try tinkering with editing as soon as I'd finished the first draft and got feedback from some beta readers, but I discovered I was changing one bit one day, then going back and changing it again the next ...or even changing it BACK to what it had been before. This push-pull was not helping matters, so I put the project away.

When I renewed editing five years later, I re-read the whole thing first. By that time I was looking at the book as a reader, not the writer. It was actually pleasurable to wave bye-bye to lengthy bits. I had absolutely no trouble hacking away chapters and scenes that no longer worked for me. In fact, it was fun. I was able to reduce the size by over a third, and that's AFTER adding bits as well, to sharpen focus and make better transitions.

I compare that kind of distanced editing with clearing out a closet that is overstuffed and nearly unusable. You can't find stuff, you can't keep it clean, you forget what's at the back of it. So you haul everything out and start chucking things into the bin. Then you repack the closet with the must-keep items. You don't feel the loss of the stuff you threw away; what you discover is lots of lovely space instead, coupled with the fact that the closet is now much more user-friendly. However, you wouldn't have wanted to throw these items away just after you bought them, would you? They still felt valuable then.

Distance is the key to good editing, I reckon.