I always hated the taste of peas growing up. The rule in my family was that I had to eat as many peas as I was years old. So eight peas when I was eight years old, nine when I was nine, I won’t tell you how many I eat in one sitting today. And even at the age of 8, I had a really hard time choking them down. All five of my siblings would have cleared their plates already and I’d be left alone with my peas.

Family lore suggests that once my brothers hid a single pea inside a blueberry muffin (a pea masquerading as a blueberry)  and then tried feeding me the muffin. I found it—that one pea. I did not eat it.

I have a vivid memory of being at home with a babysitter one night. We’d been served peas with our chicken nuggets, or whatever the main dish was. I can only remember the peas. I came up with a plan that I knew wouldn’t fly with my parents, but I thought maybe I’d have a little more leeway with the babysitter. I stood, took my dishes to the sink (those eight or so peas rolling around on the plate). When the babysitter intercepted me I explained to her that I was full. “I can’t eat anymore.”

“Well,” she said. “I guess you’re too full for dessert then.”

I saw that coming. I was naive but, I thought, clever, so I said to her, “My dinner stomach is full. My dessert stomach is still empty.”

I don’t remember how she responded. The correct reply would have been of course, “You only have one stomach.” But I was done with the good-for-me stuff. Hadn’t even started really. I wanted a treat.

I mentioned previously that a character, Diana, no longer fit in my novel, Every Cinderella Has Her Midnight. Diana didn’t benefit the story, or the story was re-envisioned better without her in it. She was more of a dessert kind of character and, like all desserts, wasn’t contributing in a significant way. It was hard to let go though, as any dieter will attest to. I’d painstakingly created Diana, even grew to love her. And we do love the sweet stuff. But we have to be ruthless in killing our darlings.

And it’s not just characters. It’s anything that’s unnecessary—a fabulous subplot, even sentences. Let go of that perfect line that made you laugh out loud, or weep unashamedly, (which is embarrassing because it was you that wrote that bit of fiction in the first place, and you’re laughing, or weeping, alone in your robe and slippers). We have to demand a function of each scene, make room for the good stuff.

And, by the way, cutting the unnecessary from our daily lives works in the same way. We only have this one stomach.

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