Half of good work is deleting the parts you were proud of that weren’t actually helping.

Attachment forms around effort, not quality, so the passages that took longest are the hardest to cut and often the ones that need cutting. Keeping them protects your feelings at the expense of the thing you made. Editing is mostly the discipline of serving the work rather than your own history with it.

Go through your next draft looking specifically at what you like most. Ask whether each of those parts is doing a job or just sitting there being admired. Save them in a separate file if that makes it easier to let them go.