There's a lot that didn't make it into the Do Interesting book. Including, this. Though, now I come to think of it, maybe it's in the PowerPoint book. I can't remember. Ah well.
One of the worst bits of editing advice ever is Murder Your Darlings. (Arthur Quiller-Couch apparently. I've always taken it to mean 'be prepared to cut bits even if you really like them'. It seems he was making a more subtle point, something like - 'cut the bits that you really like because of some pleasing rhetorical flourish you've done, they're likely to be overwrought in some way.')
Either way. It's hard advice to follow. They're my darlings! And I should murder them?
There is better advice in Richard Thaler's Misbehaving:
"When it came time to revise the manuscript, I decided to create an “outtakes” file of material that was in the first draft but was cruelly murdered. My plan is to post some of these precious masterpieces of glorious verbiage on the book’s website. I don’t know how many of these passages will actually get posted, but the beauty of this plan is that it doesn’t matter. Merely having a place where these pieces are stored in a folder on my computer labeled “outtakes” has been enough to reduce the pain of cutting some of my favorite passages, a pain that can hurt as much as wearing those expensive, ill-fitting shoes. The bigger lesson is that once you understand a behavioral problem, you can sometimes invent a behavioral solution to it. Mental accounting is not always a fool’s game."
That is very smart. And has proven very useful to me. The Do book is around 20,000 words. But we actually wrote about 40,000. So there are a lot of outtakes coming your way soon.
