Signs You're on the Right Track

I'm just starting a new project, and it's in that extremely exciting phase where you haven't realized all the traps you've set for yourself, yet, and you fool yourself into thinking maybe you really ENJOY this writing thing, and it's totally going to go smoothly this time, and probably every other time from here on it it will too, since clearly you've now figured the whole thing out.

Fool's paradise, I know. I feel like first chapters in a first draft are like the writerly version of doing whippets or something.

Except, you know, way less fun.

Points of Reference

A few months back, when I still had girl hair, I needed to get it up off my neck.

"Hey, do you have a binder?" I asked the friend I was with.

"What?"

"A binder. A hair binder."

"What?"

"You know, a...I don't know, a ponytail holder."

"OH, a HAIR tie."

Uh, yeah. A binder.

Killing Your Darlings

We're all supposed to do this. Go in with a blood-red pen and slash through all the words that we love--GOD how we love them--but which aren't doing what we need them to.

Maybe they're part of a hilarious scene that connects to nothing else in the larger work.

Or lyrical and challenging and lovely but the character they're describing/being spoken by should be cut from your MS.

Or they're pretty-good, and have one REALLY awesome metaphor buried somewhere in the creamy center, but the entire surrounding scene is just unnecessary, under-baked novel-dough. It's the incipient spare-tire of your novel. Verbal saddle-bags.