Sacrifices

I've experienced the accuracy of this statement countless times in the past 3 semesters.

Welcome to college! You may only choose two of the following:
1. Good grades
2. A social life
3. Adequate sleep

I could add quite a few more things--a love life, good health, money--but you get the idea. With life comes sacrifices. To get what you want, you have to give up something else, and you're lucky if it's ever easy.
Not only do you have to sacrifice time, comfort and possibly friendship to write, within writing itself there are also sacrifices to be made. We talked one night in my novel workshop about how we deal with cutting and editing our work, especially those beloved lines that read so poetic and lyrical but just refuse to fit in the overall piece. While they're making edits, some writers rename their word documents as they go, preserving a timeline of revisions. Some writers cut the lines and paste them at the end, only to reach the end and find they still have nowhere to put them. Some take it further and have an entire document of orphan lines and paragraphs waiting for the perfect story to adopt them.
Sacrificing words for the good of the whole is a frequent function of my writing process. After a workshop, I don't think I've ever had to go back and write more, it's always cut, cut, cut. My best work to date, which was published in my university's literary journal, was cut in half after its first workshop. Since it was under 1000 words to begin with, it took some time to build up enough courage to press the delete button, but the result was a very polished, compact piece that I am proud enough of to submit it for publication. The deadline for the next issue of the literary journal is in January and I'm really struggling with deletion for the piece I'm working on now. It's about 20 shy of the 3,000 word limit, but not only do shorter pieces just fit better in this format, I think the story is sagging in the middle. Rather than work on it, I'm expounding my troubles to the world.
So, world, echo back. Are you a deleter or an appender? What have you sacrificed for your writing?