: This sounds like a blunt-instrument extreme variation of "Kill your darlings." The idea behind kill your darlings is that sometimes we as writers fall too much in love with our own voices.

@Debbie451

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This sounds like a blunt-instrument extreme variation of "Kill your darlings."

The idea behind kill your darlings is that sometimes we as writers fall too much in love with our own voices. That perfectly-turned phrase, that exquisite image, that awesome scene, that character who's too cool for the room — we don't want to give them up.

But sometimes that perfect whatever is exactly wrong for where it is. That character needs his own book and shouldn't be sucking all the oxygen out of this one. That awesome scene is slowing down the story because it's a pointless tangent from the plot. That exquisite image isn't an accurate description of the event. That perfectly-turned phrase isn't something the character would ever say. So you have to kill them: remove them from the book. (I usually keep my dead darlings in a slush file, the better to coo over their corpses when I'm feeling unmotivated.)

Your suggested technique seems to be putting "everything you've done today" in the category of a darling, and forcing you to rewrite everything from scratch so you can work on it afresh and maybe come up with some other angle on the same problem.

Could it work? Well, maybe. Depends on a lot of variables: how much you do in a day, whether it was critical progress, whether you're stuck or in a groove. I wouldn't recommend it wholesale, but you could give it a try and see if it does anything for you.

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