: Re: To Cut or not to Cut, that is the Question I have previously mentioned in other posts that I was a molecular biologist and ICU nurse. Sadly, that means I am bedeviled with a double dose

@Kevin153

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My general heuristic (which I learned from Dean Wesley Smith): Nothing gets to the reader except through a POV character. Especially through a POV character's opinions and attitudes.

If I want to get some detail or idea to the reader, I give a POV character a reason to notice it. Even better: Pay attention to it. Even better: Have an opinion about it or an attitude toward it.

If no character would attend to a given detail, then it probably doesn't affect the story. If it doesn't affect the story, I strongly question whether to put it into the manuscript.

Of course, a detail may affect characters, even if the characters don't know it. And a detail may affect the reader's experience of the story, even if no character ever notices it. See my note about omniscient POV below.

These days, I don't often have to cut things that don't fit my heuristic, because I focus on the POV character while I write.

If I write something the character doesn't notice, or doesn't linger on, or doesn't care about one way or another, I either cut it or give the character a reason to notice it, attend to it, react to it.

If you're writing an omniscient POV, you could think of the omniscient narrator as the POV character, so the reader experiences the story and its world through the narrator's observations, attention, and attitudes.

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