If you've done anything with creative writing, taken a class, been part of a writers workshops, been in a seminar, etc. you've heard the expression "Kill your darlings". I'm not sure who said it first, it's attributed to both Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald but even Stephen King says it in his book about writing, clever titled, On Writing. (Actually On Writing is a good book about both Stephen King's younger days and his take on writing. Personally I think his writing suffered when he cleaned up. He was definitely on point when he was writing with tissues stuffed up his nose to stop the bleeding because he'd done too much cocaine and was swilling cheap beer to keep his heart rate down so he could type. But I digress).
Basically "Kill your darlings" means that no matter how well written, how beautiful a passage, if it doesn't work for the story, get rid of it. Your writing exists to tell a story, not show off how clever or brilliant you are. So don't be afraid to delete something.
I've never really had a problem with this in the past and so I was always a little curious why it's so often repeated in creative writing circles. I think that most people just want to show off that they know a snazzy quote by a respected author.
Tonight I sort of get it, but not really. The novel (or as I'm referring to it now "The worst mistake I've ever made") is really just a collection of scenes that I'm stringing together. When it's finished it will read like a coherent whole (fingers crossed) but for the moment it's in pieces that I'm working to connect.
In working on those connections, things went in a different direction than I had originally planned, making about a thousand words useless. The scene no longer made sense and I didn't need it. It was a great scene, really snappy dialogue. In fact, since no one is ever going to see it, I can safely say that it's probably the best written scene in the western canon of literature. It just didn't happen to work for the story anymore. So it had to go.
The point is, worry first about telling a good story. You can worry about clever word play and polished prose later, after your story is solid and you've written the story you want to tell. You shouldn't have to worry about killing your darlings because those passages that you're so proud of and want to shout aloud from roof tops should be added at the end when they can't break the fundamentals of telling a story that people want to read. And if you've happened to have written something so beautiful that you can't part ways with it but it interferes with the story just remember, you wrote it once. You can do it again.
And for those of you keeping score, I'm at ~24.1k words. Which if we were counting (and we're not) is almost half way to 50k.
Posted by Ben Corman at 10:18 PM