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Not long ago I started cutting my own hair—not out of necessity during the pandemic, as you might imagine. I just got frustrated with having to get it trimmed every six or eight weeks, and with my characteristic DIY mentality I wondered how hard it might be to try it myself.

After all, thanks to YouTube videos and internet searches I learned to lay tile, do minor shoe repair, and finally—much later than I’m proud to admit—broke my long-standing refusal to learn to sew on a button (“Dolphin up, dolphin down…”).

Curly hair can be notoriously tricky, because everyone’s curls have a different texture and pattern that can affect how the hair falls. But luckily curls are also notoriously forgiving—you can hide a lot in all that texture and volume (including pens, small hair clips you lose track of, and the occasional twig or leaf you can’t for the life of you figure out how it got in there), and I’ve had enough unsatisfying haircuts that I figured I probably couldn’t do too much worse on my own.

To my surprise, my first effort was good. Really good, actually. Easily among the happiest I’ve been with any haircut. I found a video tutorial that showed the style I was looking for and painstakingly followed every single instruction, telling myself that if it was a disaster I’d simply go to my hairdresser to fix it—which made me pretty willing to commit to cutting quite a lot of hair. And I’ve been relatively happy with every self-cut since.

Until my most recent one…which was fairly disastrous. It came out flat and wedgy on top, triangular and poofy and uneven everywhere else. I kept trimming over the few weeks afterward, but it was only making things worse, so last week I decided to just start all over and do the whole cut again.

Et voila. The same good, consistent results I’ve had every other time.

You’re not here to hear about my hairstyling, so let’s get to the point as it relates to your writing, editing, and revising.

Don’t Be Afraid to Commit

So what went wrong with that first cut? I got nervous and chickened out on the first terrifying chop, which sets the guideline for the entire rest of the head.

On every other haircut I’ve been fearless, trusting the technique and having faith that the results would be decent, and that my hairdresser could fix them if not.

But recently my longtime hairdresser upped sticks and moved out of the state. I think in my mind I was operating without a net on this cut, and so I was way too timid on that first crucial chop, which meant the whole rest of the haircut was thrown out of whack: too long, too heavy, the wrong shape. For weeks afterward I kept making little trims here and there to try to fix it, but it didn’t help because the core problem still existed: the “foundation” was still off.

It’s terrifying to make big, substantive cuts in your story—even if you’re not happy with how it’s holding together. Taking out an extraneous character or storyline, excising scenes that are stalling momentum, killing a darling—even if you know the cuts have to be made, it’s scary not to know exactly how it’s going to turn out, or what effect it might have on the rest of the manuscript. Stories are a tapestry—pull one thread and maybe the whole thing will unravel.

Even if you know cuts have to be made, it’s scary not to know exactly how it’s going to turn out, or what effect it might have on the rest of the manuscript.

Often I’ll see authors make the same mistake I made with my hair: They wimp out, hedging their bets and being too conservative, or hacking away little by little trying to clean up the story or make it work without making big, sweeping cuts that may be necessary.

But like my hair, most of the time that just makes things messier. When there are parts of your story that are hampering the whole and need to be cut (and determining what those are and whether they actually need to go or are salvageable is its own art—one I dedicated much of my book Intuitive Editing to exploring), you just have to make that cut.

Read more: “How to Kill a Darling”

The beauty of committing to major cuts like that is that nothing is truly at risk. With my hair I can always try again, or go to a pro.

With your writing you have numerous safety nets: Save various versions of the story so that if you change your mind or it doesn’t work you can revert to what you had before. Or put all the excised material in a discard file, to be restored to the manuscript if you change your mind or aren’t happy with the revisions. I’ve done this for years, often winding up with hundreds of pages of cut material with every story, and I’ve almost never gone back and retrieved any of it.

So be bold. I was so damned nervous about being too drastic even with my do-over haircut that at first I made the same overconservative mistake as on the initial bad cut. I had to start all over again midway through because I could already see that I wasn’t fixing the problem. And this time I just lopped off a couple of inches, realizing that that’s what would solve the core issue and make the whole cut come together.

You Don’t Always Need a Pro

Knowing that if I need to I can always go to a professional to help me is my failsafe when I do my own cuts.

As writers in the current publishing environment we’re fortunate to have unprecedented direct access to experienced pros who can help us with our stories, too, if we get to an obstacle or problem we can’t figure out how to solve on our own.

But it’s tempting to think you always have to rely on these professionals in order to produce good creative work, and in my view that’s not necessarily true, despite what the burgeoning freelance industry might like authors to believe.

The role of editors (and, to varying degrees, coaches) is to help authors see what they may not be able to see in their own writing—to help them bridge the gap between their intentions and the execution on the page, which can sometimes fall into a writer’s blind spot, and convey their vision effectively.

But the author’s role doesn’t encompass simply drafting the story. Editing and revision are core skills of being a writer—often the main work of the creative process, in fact. Authors must learn to develop their skills not just as writers, but as editors of their own work.

You may need help to get a clear view, but there are many ways to do that that don’t necessarily mean going to a pro—the same way I bought a three-way mirror to be able to fully see what I was doing with my hair cutting and how effective it was: from time/distance away from the story to regain your objectivity, to critique partners, beta readers, etc. (I offer more DIY alternatives in Intuitive Editing.) Learning your craft fully includes learning how to diagnose and address problems in your story.

It’s a Process, and There Is No “Fail”

You may not be able to tell right away whether the cuts you’re making are actually improving the story; I can’t tell you how many authors I work with turn in revised drafts to me after our first editorial pass saying things like, “I have no idea if it’s any good…I think I may have messed the whole thing up and it just feels like a hash to me.”

Just as I still wasn’t sure whether I’d fixed my bad haircut when I finished that revision cut, couldn’t see how it would hold together until I dried it and could see how the curls fell, authors can get so enmeshed in everything they’ve cut and changed, so busy worrying about all that lies around them on the proverbial cutting room floor they can’t clearly see whether what’s left behind is improved or simply diminished until they finish and regain some objectivity and see how well the whole is holding together.

But then I dive into their revised story and they’ve shored up every weakness, made the whole infinitely more cohesive and effective, the story hanging together beautifully. They just couldn’t see it for themselves when they were so close to it.

Yet even if it’s still not right, it’s okay. Most stories can be fixed, even if it may take more time or more drafts than you hoped.

And if they can’t, that’s still okay—you simply put that manuscript in the drawer and start another one, bringing what you’ve learned to the new story. No effort is wasted: That’s how we grow as artists.

I’ve been gifted with this lesson with my hair by a few big mistakes—a drastic and ill-advised very short cut that didn’t suit me at all; a home coloring incident that turned it black, and one that turned it orange; and, believe it or not, a very, very unfortunate perm in my teen years administered by a hairdresser who somehow didn’t realize I already had naturally curly hair.

Those mistakes—as bad as they may have seemed at the time—freed me, and I realized that even in the worst-case scenario it’s hair: It’ll grow back.

Similarly, our words aren’t written in stone, and our stories aren’t sacred documents that can’t be changed. They’re living, evolving, organic entities—and you’re a creator; you can always, always create.

How about you, authors—how do you figure out what may not be working in your stories? And when you know big cuts need to be made, what are your techniques for overcoming the fear and doing them?

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