The worst part of being an editor is the cutting. Not the mechanical kind, where you trim a wordy sentence or remove a redundant paragraph. That is satisfying, like pruning a plant. I mean the big cuts. The ones where you look at a chapter the author spent months writing, a chapter that has real beauty in it, and you say, “This has to go.”

I have been thinking about this because a friend who is working on her first novel asked me how editors decide what to cut. She assumed there was a formula or a set of rules. There is not. Every cut is a judgment call, and some of those calls haunt you. What I can share is a set of stories about the hardest editorial decisions we have made at ScrollWorks Media, and what we learned from each one.

The Prologue That Almost Killed a Novel

When Catherine Voss submitted the first draft of The Last Archive, it opened with a forty-page prologue set in 1920s Vienna. The writing was extraordinary. The scene depicted a young archivist discovering a cache of documents in a crumbling library while outside the window, the political situation deteriorated. It was atmospheric, historically precise, and genuinely moving.

It was also the wrong way to start the book.

The main narrative of The Last Archive takes place in the present day. The protagonist is a modern archivist dealing with contemporary problems. The Vienna prologue was backstory, relevant backstory, but backstory nonetheless. Readers who picked up the book expecting a contemporary mystery would have spent the first forty pages in a different century, meeting characters who would not reappear for another two hundred pages.

Our editor Clara raised the issue gently in her first editorial letter. Catherine’s response was, to put it diplomatically, resistant. She had spent four months researching 1920s Vienna. She had visited archives in person. The prologue contained some of her best writing, and she knew it. Cutting it felt like cutting a limb.

We went back and forth for three weeks. Clara proposed alternatives: moving the material to a later point in the narrative, condensing it to five pages, splitting it into flashback chapters woven through the book. Catherine tried each approach and rejected them all. The Vienna material, she argued, established the emotional and historical stakes for everything that followed.

In the end, the compromise was unusual. The prologue was cut from the published book entirely, but Catherine reworked elements of the research and atmosphere into the main narrative, distributing the Vienna material across three chapters in the book’s second half. The historical context arrived when readers were already invested in the story and ready to receive it. The opening chapter became what is now the book’s first scene: our modern protagonist arriving at a new job and finding something unexpected in the archives.

I still think about those forty pages sometimes. They were beautiful. But the book is better without them at the front, and I believe Catherine would agree, though she might not say so out loud.

The Character Who Had to Die Differently

James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron is a historical novel that deals with, among other things, the human cost of industrial expansion. In the original draft, a secondary character died in a foundry accident that was described in graphic, visceral detail across eight pages.

The writing was unflinching. Whitfield had researched nineteenth-century industrial accidents with scholarly thoroughness, and the scene reflected that. Every detail was historically accurate. The problem was not the scene’s quality. The problem was its effect.

Two of our early readers, both of whom we trusted for honest feedback, said the scene was so brutal that it temporarily broke their engagement with the novel. One said she put the book down for three days after reading it and almost did not pick it back up. The other said the level of physical detail made him question whether the author was interested in the character as a person or as a vehicle for depicting suffering.

This was difficult feedback to deliver because both readings were legitimate. Whitfield was not being gratuitous. The scene was historically grounded and served a clear narrative purpose. The character’s death was supposed to change the trajectory of the novel’s central relationship. But if readers were putting the book down and not coming back, the scene was failing at its job regardless of its technical merit.

The editorial conversation lasted two months. Whitfield felt strongly that sanitizing the death would be dishonest. Industrial work in that era was brutal, and he did not want to look away from that brutality. I sympathized with his position. Historical fiction that softens the past does a disservice to the people who lived through it.

The solution we reached was about perspective, not content. Instead of describing the accident itself in clinical detail, the revised scene depicts it through the eyes of the protagonist, who arrives at the foundry afterward. The reader sees the aftermath and the protagonist’s reaction rather than the event itself. The horror is preserved, maybe even intensified, because the reader’s imagination fills in what the text leaves out. And the scene’s emotional purpose, the effect on the central relationship, comes through more powerfully because the focus is on the living character’s response rather than the dying character’s suffering.

Whitfield later told me it was the best edit we made. He said the revised scene was more honest, not less, because it captured how people actually experience tragedy: not in the moment of the event but in the aftermath, when the reality sets in.

Cutting a Quarter of a Non-Fiction Manuscript

When David Okonkwo delivered the first draft of The Cartographer’s Dilemma, it was 120,000 words. The contracted length was 80,000. He had overshot by fifty percent.

This is more common in non-fiction than in fiction. Researchers fall in love with their material. They have spent years gathering information, and leaving any of it out feels like waste. Okonkwo had traveled to archives on three continents. He had conducted dozens of interviews. Every chapter contained fascinating material that he had earned through hard work, and asking him to cut 40,000 words felt like asking him to throw away years of effort.

But 120,000 words is too long for the audience he was trying to reach. His book is written for general readers, not specialists. A 400-page non-fiction book about cartography is a hard sell. A 280-page one is much more approachable.

Our editor David (yes, two Davids, which has caused confusion in our office more than once) proposed a structural approach. Rather than trimming evenly throughout, they identified three chapters that, while interesting, were tangential to the book’s main argument. Two of those chapters dealt with historical episodes that were fascinating on their own but did not directly advance the narrative Okonkwo was building. The third was a technical deep-dive on cartographic projection methods that, while rigorous, assumed more mathematical background than the target reader would likely have.

Removing those three chapters cut 30,000 words. The remaining 10,000 came from line-level editing: tightening prose, removing redundancies, and condensing passages that made the same point multiple ways. The resulting manuscript was leaner and more focused. Okonkwo, to his credit, recognized that the cuts improved the book, though he did ask if we could publish the cut chapters as a separate online supplement. We did, and they are available on our website for readers who want to go deeper.

The Ending That Needed to Change

Elena Marsh’s Still Waters originally ended on a note of resolution. The narrator, after a long journey of self-examination, arrived at a place of peace. The final pages were warm, reflective, and reassuring. They wrapped up the narrative threads neatly and left the reader with a sense of completion.

Our editor Maren thought the ending was a betrayal of everything that came before it.

That sounds harsh, and Maren would probably phrase it more diplomatically now. But her editorial letter was direct. The book’s power, she argued, came from its willingness to sit with uncertainty. The narrator spends the entire book grappling with questions that do not have clean answers: questions about memory, about family, about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives. An ending that resolved those questions undercut the book’s intellectual and emotional honesty.

Elena’s initial reaction was defensive, which is entirely understandable. Authors write endings last, and by that point they are exhausted. The desire to wrap things up, to give the reader (and themselves) relief, is natural. Elena said she wanted to leave readers with something hopeful.

Maren’s response was that hope and resolution are not the same thing. A book can end hopefully without resolving every question. In fact, the hope might be more powerful if it coexists with ongoing uncertainty. The message would shift from “everything works out” to “life is complicated and hard and we can still find our way forward.” That, Maren argued, was more honest and more hopeful.

The revised ending is quieter than the original. The narrator does not arrive at a definitive understanding. Instead, the book ends with a scene of ordinary life that contains within it the echo of everything that came before. It is ambiguous in the best sense. Different readers interpret it differently, which I think is a sign that it is doing its job.

Elena has said in interviews that the ending was the hardest part of the book to write, and she specifically credits Maren’s feedback for pushing her toward something better than what she had initially imagined.

Cutting Technical Detail From an Accessible Book

When we were editing Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners by Alexander Hawthorne, we faced a version of the non-fiction cutting problem that was specific to technology writing. Alexander’s original draft included detailed explanations of cryptographic hash functions, including mathematical notation and step-by-step descriptions of the SHA-256 algorithm.

The explanations were accurate and well-written. For a reader with some technical background, they were excellent. For the “absolute beginner” the book was targeting, they were impenetrable.

Alexander, understandably, felt that omitting the technical details was dumbing down the material. He argued that readers deserved to understand how the technology actually worked, not just what it did. I agreed with him in principle. The question was whether a deep dive into cryptographic algorithms belonged in this specific book, or whether it would be better served by a different book aimed at a different audience.

We compromised. The technical material was condensed into a brief conceptual explanation in the main text, focusing on what hash functions accomplish rather than how they accomplish it mathematically. Alexander used an analogy involving fingerprints that gets the concept across without requiring any mathematical knowledge. The detailed technical explanations moved to an appendix for readers who wanted to go deeper.

This is a pattern I have seen in every accessible non-fiction book we have published. There is always a tension between depth and accessibility, and the edit always involves deciding where the line is for this particular book and this particular reader. Getting it right requires knowing your audience, which means sometimes telling an author that the material they are most proud of needs to move to the back of the book or out of it entirely.

What These Stories Have in Common

Looking back at these decisions, a few patterns emerge.

First, the hardest cuts are never about bad writing. Bad writing is easy to cut. Nobody mourns a clunky paragraph. The material that is hardest to remove is the material that is genuinely good but does not serve the book. Beautiful prose that slows the pacing. Accurate research that overwhelms the reader. Powerful scenes that disrupt the emotional arc. Quality is necessary but not sufficient. A passage also has to be in the right place, doing the right work.

Second, every one of these decisions involved collaboration. An editor alone cannot make these calls. The author has to be part of the process, and their resistance is often legitimate. When an author pushes back on a suggested cut, they frequently have a reason worth hearing. The best editorial outcomes come from genuine dialogue, where the editor identifies a problem and the author participates in finding the solution.

Third, the solution is rarely simple deletion. In every case I described, the material that was “cut” actually reappeared in a different form. The Vienna prologue became distributed flashbacks. The graphic death scene became an aftermath scene. The cut chapters became an online supplement. The technical details became an appendix. The word “cut” is misleading. “Transformed” might be more accurate.

Fourth, time helps. In every case, the author initially resisted the change and later came to appreciate it. This is not because editors are always right. We are not. But the emotional attachment an author has to their material in the moment of writing is different from the perspective they have six months later. Distance allows for clearer evaluation, and authors who initially fought a cut often become its strongest defenders.

What I Wish Authors Knew About the Cutting Process

If you are a writer, here is what I want you to hear. When an editor suggests cutting something you love, they are not saying it is bad. They are saying it is in the wrong place, or the book has outgrown it, or the reader cannot absorb it at that point in the narrative. These are structural problems, not quality judgments.

Your editor has read your book more carefully than almost anyone except you. They have read it multiple times, from different angles, with the reader’s experience constantly in mind. When they suggest a cut, they are doing it because they believe the book will be stronger without that material in that position. They might be wrong. But they are not being careless or cruel.

Save everything you cut. Every deleted scene, every removed chapter, every trimmed passage. Put it in a folder. Some of it will find a home later, in a different book or a different form. Some of it will remain in the folder forever. But saving it makes the cutting easier, because you know the work is not lost. It is just waiting.

And finally: the willingness to cut is a sign of maturity, not weakness. The writers I admire most are the ones who hold their work tightly enough to make it good and loosely enough to make it better. That balance is hard to achieve, and it takes practice. But it is the difference between a writer who produces competent work and one who produces something that stays with readers long after they finish the last page.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.