Image via WikipediaI know that editing during the first draft is a bad idea, but I've been compelled to do the most major form of editing that I've come across: cutting out entire scenes.Or rather, ripping them out. I literally tore about five pages out of my notebook when I realized that I was going in a direction that was completely wrong. In fact, I may need to do away with several scenes. They're all getting repetitive.
At this point I fear I may even need to re-title my novel, "A plot revealed through a bunch of characters sitting around talking about it."
Of course, the problem isn't that extreme, but it might as well be. Any problem is magnified to twice its size in the eyes of the readers, be it an inconsistency or an author who is too frightened to leave the exposition.
As I reminisce about my older novel projects that have been started but never finished, I realize that they all could have possibly been saved had I sat down, looked at all of the scenes I had, and figured out which ones could be combined, especially if they take place in the same setting and are made up mostly of exposition. I just don't know how to get the beginning of the novel all squared away so that I can jump right into the middle. It has always been a problem of mine; the first novel I ever started writing had about 150 pages and at least 20,000 words before I really even got into any of the action at all.
Now that I have recognized this problem, I feel as if I've taken a huge jump forward in remedying it. There are some scenes that just don't belong. Even if they reveal necessary information, that necessary information may not be necessary at that exact moment in the story's timeline. You can always put it in wherever you feel it needs to go in the rewrite. The first draft is, more or less, about getting the very basic story out of you and onto the page so that you can work with it. It's better if you don't even worry about spelling and grammar until you sit down to do that editing.
Some things are even better left unsaid, like Hemingway said in his famous Iceberg Theory.
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. ---Hemingway
For example, Hawthorne never writes, "The Reverend Dimmesdale was too scared to admit what he had done."
He makes you know it, and without ever saying a word.
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