 Drama: November 26, 2025 Issue [#13473] |
This week: The Drama of Cutting Your Own Scenes Edited by: Jayne  
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| Hi, I'm Jayne. I'll be your editor today. |
Depending on the type of drama you’re writing, the emotional stakes will vary from real-life scenarios to smackdowns that absolutely would not happen in real life but feel so perfect on the page.
It doesn’t really matter which kind of writer you are. For all authors, these scenes feel important. They feel big. They feel like the heart of the story.
But sometimes they aren’t.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Not every intense moment belongs in your final draft. Some scenes exist because you enjoyed writing them, and some exist because you needed to process something emotionally. Maybe you were procrastinating the next plot point and were spinning your wheels.
The reality is these scenes often don’t move the plot forward in any meaningful way, and now your drama has its own drama: editing out your beloved scenes because they’re dead weight.
The First Cut Is the Deepest
Cutting those dear-to-your-heart scenes feels so brutal because you, the writer, poured something real into them: energy, frustration, catharsis, maybe even a little bit of your own heart.
But readers don’t have that attachment. Readers only care whether a scene serves the story.
It’s important to remember that emotional stakes are not the same as narrative stakes. For a scene to remain in your story, it must serve both purposes. If the scene doesn’t change the story in some way, it probably doesn’t have as much value as you think. In fact, it may not matter at all.
The Three Questions To Ask
Before you keep any dramatic scene, ask yourself:
1. Does something change because of this scene?
If the answer is no, that’s a red flag. Take it out and read your story again (and see #3 in this list).
2. Does the scene create consequences the story actually follows?
A dramatic moment that never matters again is just noise. It might be the greatest noise ever written, but drama for drama’s sake doesn’t make a story better.
3. Would the story still work if the scene vanished?
Is it tighter or does it have more momentum? Does what is left have more impact because it doesn’t get muddled by extraneous drama? If the answer is yes, you know what has to happen. (I’m not even sorry about it.)
Great drama isn’t measured by how loud a character gets, how many tears fall, or how devastating the revelation is. Great drama is measured by the ripple effect and the aftermath.
Take a Breath: Cutting Isn’t Losing
It is tough to admit a dramatic scene creates nothing to clean up, causes nothing to shift, and offers nothing to haunt the story or the reader. But that doesn’t mean your writing served no purpose.
Cut scenes shouldn’t be deleted entirely. They may not belong in this story, but that doesn’t mean they don’t belong anywhere.
They can be character studies you revisit. They can be emotional sketches that, if slightly reworked, belong in a different narrative. They become prompts for future writing endeavours. So, save them to a scene bucket ("Don’t Toss the Scraps!" ) and revisit them from time to time.
If you take nothing else from this newsletter, let it be this:
Cutting a dramatic scene doesn’t mean you’ve become a worse writer.
It means you’ve become a stronger editor.
So flip that script in your head, and instead of worrying about cutting your “best” scenes, worry about offering your best story.
As always, happy writing. |
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