100 Day Creative Challenge Day 54: Kill Your Darlings
William Faulkner once said, “In writing, you must kill your darlings.”
Kill your darlings refers to parts of our manuscript (or painting or song lyric or music score) that we have fallen in love with but perhaps are not in-sync with the rest of the story, are no longer needed or may be obviously included to sound clever and may be distracting to the reader.
We can get precious about our own work and especially precious about that phrase that took us five hours to edit and get just right. Darn it! That baby is going to be used somehow!
However, if our critique partner or editor tells us that it just doesn’t work, do we dig in and keep it because it’s our work and we reserve the right to the say final say?
Or do we admit the truth and kill off our darlings?
I must admit that I find it difficult so I’ve developed a few strategies to help me kill off my darlings.
Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings. Stephen King On Writing.
1) Use the strike through tool. Often I’ll strike through some text so I can come back and rework it later. This way it’s sort of like kidnapping the words and holding them hostage rather than murdering them outright!
2) Copy and Paste: I copy and paste sentences or paragraphs I’m thinking of reworking or considering cutting into another document and store them for later. This way they can be resurrected later or used in another project.
3) Pull them off like a band-aid. Last year I participated in a master class with the fabulous Margie Lawson. She circled whole paragraphs of my WIP and wrote in highlighter: Sorry, but this has to go. I had the choice to ignore her advice or just cut them out right then and there. When you cut the darlings out right then and there, the pain is over quickly.
4) Start a whole new version: I have cut out thousands of wasted words and irrelevant parts of a novel because I went off on a tangent. I cut it, but didn’t dispose of it completely. Sometimes you just need to start again with a fresh perspective. It’s like decluttering your house.
He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. William Faulkner
