Why 'False Attachment' will kill your writing.

I'm finishing a novel. Actually, I'm working on two right now... One is my NaNoWriMo novel that I'm plotting and doing all that crazy fun prep stuff for. A lot of the ideas for that are coming fast, furious and often, being dumped just as fast.

The other novel is the one I started in Sarah Sheard's class in the fall of 1996, so a lot of that has been kicking around for 2 decades now.

Actually, only about 6,000 words of it are from then. The other 8,000 or so I've put on it since re-starting my writing has been written in the last couple months.

Most of that, while I think is interesting and potentially useful, I have no issue with altering and cutting from the manuscript.

I'm a lot less willing to dump the early stuff simply because it's been around so long. It's become calcified and part of my past.

 "But, but...I wrote that in that cafe just off Baldwin, where that cute girl was and it was that summer and OH THE MEMORIES!!!"

Still doesn't make the draft any less shitty. And the fact of the matter is, it doesn't represent where I am right now in the novel and where I want to go. So, bit by bit, section by section, it's being eroded and replaced by a retcon of the first section.

The lesson here is never be afraid to put on your big boy or girl pants and kill your darlings, no matter how old they've gotten.