“Sentimental Tool”- TNB

There are two kinds of people: Keepers and Throwers. I’m a Keeper. I can’t throw anything away.

This epiphany came while editing a recent story that my editor had called, “unwieldy,” a polite way of saying, “Get to the bloody point.” His version of the piece was five-hundred words. My original was nearly two-thousand. His was better, I knew, but at what cost? I was heartbroken. Where were all the little side-musings, the digressions? What happened to the eager Chinese man who loved football? “You can’t just cut the Chinese guy,” I wrote in an email.

My editor liked my wit, but felt I was hindering my story with irrelevancies. I went to task, cutting into the piece, wincing with each sentence’s deletion. Why was this so hard for me? They’re just sentences. It reminded me of spring cleaning and I suddenly thought about how maybe it wasn’t only my stories that I was hindering.

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