Some time ago I drafted an essay on cutting words from essays, intended for a cheesy writing contest, and never submitted it. I was thinking about this essay, languishing on my hard drive, as I was packing out to move to a new city. It struck me: revising and de-cluttering are remarkably similar processes. And I solved them in the same way, without connecting either the problems or the solutions to each other.

Deciding what to leave behind, and what to throw out, is psychologically painful. So is cutting words from something I’ve written, especially if I think they are good words, sentences, paragraphs.

But bringing too much stuff makes life unpleasant, and may not even be possible. Same with all those words. (Same with, like, everything.)

How to choose what comes with and what stays behind is the topic for another essay. This essay isn’t about what to let go of, it’s about how I trick myself into being okay with letting go of the words I already know are the ones to cut, and leave behind the things I already know I don’t need, yet can’t quite bring myself to part with.

[ See: revision checklist, what counts as an iteration, and the grug brained writer for more on the theme of revision. For more on tricking yourself as a core life skill, see: Delusional Optimism & the Art of Sneaking Up on Your Goals ]

My solution is gradual, reversible distancing. This lets me see what life is like without the thing, before I commit to letting go of it.

In the essay I never published or even submitted, I wrote about a trick I learned from my brother, of putting the bad words at the end and the good words at the top. An excerpt:

When I was a teenager, my older brother and literary hero, a published writer, gave me a tip: rather than cutting material from a piece, move it to the end of the document.

I have always been a bit of a coward regarding revision. This has made it so much easier. It separates the intellectual decision to cut from the actual cutting, which lessens the emotional resistance.

I’ve incorporated the spirit of my brother’s advice into how I revise, though I’ve expanded on the exact process:

I save a version before any major changes, and think of each new version as “just an experiment”. If my cuts make the piece worse, I can easily revert to the previous version. In practice, I rarely do, but it’s comforting to know that I can.

I write in Markdown, which allows me to comment out a word or sentence in-place: it’s still visible when I’m editing, but it doesn’t show up in the final version. “Commenting out” is less of a commitment than deleting. This lack of finality makes it easier to try cutting a word or phrase without fretting over it too much.

Later, I move the parts I’ve commented out to the end of the document. There they sit: out of the flow, out of the way, but still accessible. If I want to fish a phrase out of the waste pile and put it back in, I can.

Finally, I realize that even cuts which seemed unthinkable before I made them benefited the piece as a whole. I save a new version, and delete all the commented out material. I turn an unpublishable 6,600-word story into a published 4,000-word story.

As I was sorting my stuff, I dedicated one shoebox to “barely worth keeping” (I later renamed it to “store and/or pass along”, in case someone saw the label, and then saw a gift they had given me inside it). I dedicated one half of a second shoebox to what I nicknamed “my unhappy pile”. In it: my evergrowing tailings pile of dead, half-disassembled Sandisk Sansa Clip+ MP3 players; and all three of my beloved analog wristwatches, all of which drowned while I was running in the rain.

These two collections saved me a great deal of time. Because every time I encountered an object with some kind of stuck energy, it broke my sorting flow. I would stare at it gloomily, and then put it back in the pile it came from to decide about later. Then I’d pick it up again, fail again, get derailed. But I noticed: working with these objects in batches was much more effective.

Partly, I think, it was because it was possible to procrastinate on deciding on the really hard things (I never seemed to fully reach inbox-zero on either pile) by deciding about the slightly less troublesome items. I never zeroed the piles, but every few hours I seemed to be able to halve them. I gave away all kinds of things I had been dreading getting rid of for psychological or logistical reasons, and it felt wonderful. All because I separated the preliminary decisions (usually right), from the final decisions.

This way, I could see what my to bring pile looked like without the things I was unsure about, and it was plain that I had plenty of stuff! And I could look at my unhappy piles and realize, yes, there’s a reason these things give me a sinking feeling in my stomach. But someone who gave me a gift I don’t use probably wouldn’t want me to feel burdened by it and unable to give it away for the rest of my life, out of consideration for their feelings.

There is a psychological bias where we are more attached to things we own (link). I think that part of what these two techniques do, is they make the material-I-know-I-should-get-rid-of-but-but-can’t-bring-myself-to a separate thing. It is no longer part of us, part of the essay that we are attached to (we’re attached to it, sometimes, because we are fond of the essay, and it is part of the essay. But even if both it and the essay are good, sometimes the essay is better off without it.) It becomes something we can look at objectively.

This principle, I think, goes further. After I stopped eating sugar, I stopped craving it. When you remove something temporarily, it gives you the objectivity to decide whether to remove it permanently. It is no longer automatically part of you, a thing so wound up with the way you are that removing it is painful. You can see that you are complete without it.

And sometimes, the commas go back in. The ungrammatical version sparks joy in a way the polished version doesn’t. Memorabilia is fished from the discard pile.

Sometimes, we must let go of letting go (of letting go).