Are You Absolutely Positively Sure I Need to Kill My Darlings?
It’s Been Explained to Death, so Why Do We Still Fight it?
If you can relate to the passage below, get ready to raise your hand.
You’ve written a masterpiece. You know it. You’ve revised it, edited it, and edited it some more. You’ve shown it to your friends, and they loved it. Your critique group did, too. Same for your beta readers. Now it’s time for your developmental editor to work her magic. So, you send it off, and you wait.
Eight weeks later, she returns it, and you race through her notes. Hooray! She loves it! You breathe a sigh of relief. Oh, sure, it needs work, but it’s coming along. She praises you for all your hard work, and as you continue to examine it, a note in the margin stops you dead.
She wants you to cut how many pages out of it?
She can’t be serious. You shoot her an email and ask her to explain why?
She tells you your masterpiece needs to go on a book diet.
You gasp. What in God’s name is she thinking? You’re already under 90,000 words. How low can you go? You whip off another email. You make a case for leaving the thing just the way it is.
Nope, it needs to lose thirty pages.
Whuuuuuut?
Let’s Back up a Bit
This was my story at one point in the writing process of my debut novel. I was told to cut several — more than several — of the scenes that involved the main character and her mother. Actually, she had suggested I eliminate all of them except one. It was the most pivotal scene from the main character’s past and the event that revealed the origin of her wound. It was also the first plot point (brushes sweat from brow).
I get it. It’s a powerful scene. What about all the others? Was there any hope for them?
Apparently not, and just like that, they’re left on the cutting room floor. (Actually, I pasted them into a Word doc and saved them in a separate file — the pain of losing them was too acute. They may or may not be useful in another piece of writing, but I’ll be the judge of that.)
All right, I guess I’m a true author now. I killed my darlings.
Definition, Please
Wait a second. What does this even mean, this idea of killing off your most treasured bits of writing? Is this really what the biggest names in the craft want us to do?
Well…not exactly.
Here’s what MasterClass has to say about it. It’s the process by which we eliminate any unnecessary plot lines, characters, or sentences for the sake of the overall story. It’s the practice of losing the parts of our story that are not essential, don’t advance it, and don’t add value, but that we’re attached to.
Another way of saying it is the only value these pieces of writing add is to us and our ego.
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” ~Stephen King, On Writing
But It’s so Hard…
King got it right. While it’s difficult to hear, these passages speak more to the writer than the reader. These passages are about us. My editor knew it as soon as she read them. There in the slew of darlings she wanted me to cut were many (too many) of the emotional moments that had come to define my relationship with my mother — instead of my character’s relationship with hers. These scenes weren’t about my character at all. But I was so wrapped up in them I couldn’t tell the difference. Somewhere along the way, I’d gone off track. Way off.
While I thought I was pulling pivotal experiences from my past and using them to enhance the scenes in my character’s story, I wasn’t. The episodes may have been juicy yarns about my teenage years; they may have even been a little spicy, but they did nothing to enhance the plot. Worse, they would’ve confused the reader should they have remained. The story would’ve suffered at the hands of its writer. Me.
If killing your darlings is so important then why is it so damn hard to do?
To answer this question, let’s return to my situation. My book was in its final stage when I presented it to my developmental editor. When she asked me to cut thirty pages, my biggest fear was I’d never write anything that good again. I’d never get the inspiration. I’d never find the right words. I’d never explain that scene, that emotion, or that movement as eloquently as I had in those passages.
That was it. That was all she (me) wrote (literally).
But it’s not true. It was only my internal editor playing havoc with my mind.
Okay, I Shredded My Best Work, Now What?
Just how do you find all those fabulously brilliant words again? One sure way is to rewrite the entire thing. That’s right. Don’t edit or revise it. Start from scratch and rewrite it. You’d be surprised how doing this ignites your creativity.
If you’re a plotter, return to your outline. If you created Scene Cards, this is the time to review them. Ask yourself, what’s going on beneath the surface? What haven’t my characters explored yet? This is also the perfect opportunity to return to ground zero: what has to happen (cause) to bring about the effect you want your reader to experience?
Writing is hard, and while your new passages may not sound exactly like the ones you eliminated, they will sound just as awesome. It’s our insecurities that try to convince us they won’t.
Remember. You did it once, and you’ll do it again. So, go ahead. Take a dagger to that manuscript. Don’t be afraid to lacerate the sucker. Slash everything that doesn’t add value to the story. Then put your butt back in the seat and write those parts anew.
Trust yourself. You got this.
