Earlier I referred to this advice from Samuel Johnson: “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

What he is warning us against, of course, is flights of ego. Anything that particularly thrills us as writers should be viewed with suspicion, because we are not writing for an audience of one -- ourselves -- but for an audience of many. If rings such a perfect bell with us, perhaps it’s because we’re locked inside our own heads and the phrase won’t resonate with anybody not locked in there with us.

Sometimes, though, it’s more than a passage. I got started writing my first book, Smoke & Mirrors, because of a series of high-profile marijuana busts in my hometown -- Missoula, Montana. The raids were obviously political, and when I began looking into them, the full horror of the so-called War on Drugs began taking shape. I wrote some articles about it, and then the book.

The chapter on which I worked the longest was about what happened in Missoula. After all, those were the events that got me started. It was a great chapter -- full of flesh-and-blood characters, action, and great quotes.

Unfortunately, by the time we got the whole book written, the Missoula chapter didn’t fit. I spent a couple of weeks rewriting it, and rewriting the chapters about it, to make it work. Never happened. There came a moment when I had to take the chapter -- which represented about three months of work and some of the best writing in the book -- and drag it to the trash. That stung.

Of course, it helps to have an editor willing to perform a radical egoectomy without anaesthesia. It helps even more to be married to said editor, as I am. Like any good editor, Margaret had no emotional attachment to the chapter and no problem at all with telling me to kill it out. Of course, she then had to live with me after that.

If you look at the first two files on this page, you’ll see that Margaret neatly excised the first seven pages of the story. I’d worked hard on those pages. And I remember that as she read, I sat across the room from her chewing my thumb knuckle and watching her draw huge X’s over the entirety of those first seven pages. My entire lede! Some of my best lines!

“Oh, stop,” she said. “You know as well as I do that sometimes you have to strangle your babies in their cradles.”

She was right, of course. The story turned out better. But Christ, this can be a painful way to make a living.