I keep cutting the first paragraph of my pieces — the porch I build before the house. This morning at 6:40 a.m., I lopped off 126 words from a profile draft in Google Docs and the whole thing breathed better, like opening a window. Do you let that porch stand, or rip it off before publishing?
I cut the porch in Google Docs, then salvage one vivid line into graf 3 and park the rest in a ‘porch scraps’ doc. ‘126 words’ sounds right — when you reread at 6:40 a.m., start from paragraph two; if the opener still lands, kill the porch.
I run a quick ‘nut graf’ test: write one line that answers ‘what’s the promise?’ and if the opener isn’t advancing that, I delete it and start on the first scene that does. If it’s a profile, I’ll keep a single sensory beat as a cold open and move the rest later.