Let’s just admit it. We all get the urge to throttle someone from time to time. Annoying coworkers, overbearing family members, and just plain nasty members of civilization—they all bear the brunt of our frustrations and our mumbled threats. When it comes to our fiction, however, we tend to be a little more lenient.
When I look at that big fat pile of manuscript on my desk, I’m much more likely to lean back in my chair, fold my hands over my stomach, and smile complacently, than I am to pull out the old X-Acto knife and start slashing. My words are like children, and no one in his right mind goes around axing his kids. That first glimpse at a finished manuscript is magical. You hold it in your arms for the first time, and those thousands of words marching across the pages, those words over which you labored for months, suddenly appear imbued with some mystical essence. It’s an essence that writers and mothers alike are familiar with: perfection.
So, really, it’s little surprise that we find it difficult to even see our mistakes, much less draw our razor-sharp red pens and cover the page in bloody excisions. It’s an unfortunate fact, however, that a little bloodletting is about the only way to prevent the inevitable rambling, bloating, and general hubris that find their way into most all of our first (and second and third) drafts.
Years ago, when I was introduced to the writerspeak term “killing your darlings,” my response was to cock a disbelieving eyebrow. The article I was reading made a statement about “taking a look at your manuscript and deleting all your favorite lines.” Understandably, I said no way and chalked the author up as a minimalist kook. It took me years and several less-than-memorable novels to understand that the point of this statement was not that I should be hacking out all my best work, but rather that I should be taking a good, long look at my “darlings” and analyzing whether their presence in the story was the result of necessity or just my smug enjoyment of my own supposed brilliance.
If this is arguably the most painful lesson an author has to learn, it’s also arguably the most valuable. Self-editing is the keenest blade in a writer’s armory. Too often, we fall so much in love with passages, characters, settings, plot twists, ad nauseum, that we miss the bigger picture. We fail to see that our darlings are actually stumbling blocks, both to our writing of the story and certainly to the reading of it.
Scriptwriter Joss Whedon reminds us to “cut what you love”:
Here’s one trick that I learned early on. If something isn’t working, if you have a story that you’ve built and it’s blocked and you can’t figure it out, take your favourite scene, or your very best idea or set-piece, and cut it. It’s brutal, but sometimes inevitable. That thing may find its way back in, but cutting it is usually an enormously freeing exercise.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of darling killing this past week, in the latest draft of my recently completed fantasy story Dreamlander. Two of my favorite scenes—scenes that I’d written with much joy and oohed and ahhed over in the second and third drafts—became increasingly obstructive to the realism of the story. Suspension of disbelief was in danger. So I chopped them. In all honesty, I knew they were scenes that should never have made it past the first draft. And as soon as that first flash of pain was over, the relief and the assurance that the story was much the better were overwhelming.
So, here’s to arming ourselves with the reddest of our red pens and setting forth to do some slaughtering of the darlings.
Story by K.M. Weiland
Tags: dreamlander , Editing
It's always hard to let go of what we love the most, but in the end it's sometimes the best thing to do.
Yep, less is usually more.
WOW!!! I love the way you have with words. You have wonderful insight and advice. It is difficult to pull myself away from your blog to attend to my own darlings! Thanks for the advice and teaching,
Thank you. BTW, I wouldn't recommend killing *those* darlings!
This sounds so scary. Cut your favorite parts? Having said that, and reading your full post, I think that I may have to cut my favorite parts and see if my story will go anywhere.
At first the writing advice seems harsh but upon further reading, the advice is very sound.
Thank you.
I'm glad I found this blog!
Your reaction sounds similar to my own when I first encountered the concept. After all, why cut the good stuff, when it's hard enough cutting the bad stuff? But knowing when to let go of the scenes I love is one of the most valuable skills I've learned as a writer.
Thank you for the advice and you have made me fell better. After publishing my historical novel of 520 pages, 'White Flowers of Yesterday,' last year I indulged in 'darling killings.'My revised book now has 336 pages.
But at times the incisions hurt me beyond words!
I ended up cutting 40,000 words from the book I talk about in the post. It was a wonderful exercise in restraint. Painful, but useful!
Thank you for the advice and you have made me feel better.
My pleasure!
KM - I am a brand to fictional writing, and I very much appreciate your helpful advice as we seek to move from writer to author. Your advice to study Larry Brooks was right on. And, having read your "Outlining" book, I'll say that BY FAR the biggest jewel in your advice was the idea of outlining backwards. It is a fabulous tool, especially to someone who has never done any of this before. And I especially appreciate your spiritual approach to the rigors of writing.
I'm so glad you enjoyed Outlining Your Novel! For something that seems completely counter-intuitive at first glance, outlining backwards is actually *very* intuitive. I've used in practically everything I've ever outlined. Glad you found it useful as well!
This is EXACTLY what I needed. There's this one scene I've been planning out, and yesterday I realized I didn't need a large chunk of it and was arguing with myself to cut it out. This was exactly what I needed, thank you!
Killing darlings is always painful. Sometimes we just have to give ourselves a little time to wean ourselves off the lovable but useless scenes.