On editing your own work

This was too good to keep to myself. From an editorial by Benjamin Percy in Poets & Writers.

"So much of revision, I've discovered, is about coming to terms with that word: gone. Letting things go. When revising, the beginning writer spends hours consulting the thesaurus, replacing a period with a semicolon, cutting adjectives, adding a few descriptive sentences - whereas the professional writer mercilessly lops off limbs, rips out innards like party streamers, drains away gallons of blood, and then calls down th lightning to bring the body back to life."

He and others quote Faulkner's heartless writing axiom: Kill your darlings.