Killing Your Darlings

When you're finally okay with "killing your darlings."*

Let me elaborate for those of you that don't write. A ton of writers are taught that a key part of the revision process is cutting back (the "killing"). Deleting a ton of unnecessary prose, dialogue, sub-plot, characters, etc. They're part of you (the "darlings"), sprung from your imagination and typed out/written out by your fingers (literal blood from paper cuts, literal sweat from hand-cramps, and literal tears from...well...all of it).

Years ago, when my graduate thesis director told me to cut out a few of the characters from my manuscript, I was like "sure, yeah, that makes a ton of sense," and the worst part of that was the logistics of it (trying to figure out what lines/personalities/etc of theirs I need to attribute to some other character). I had no qualms, because I was okay with it. It wasn't hard for me.

Then, when I sent out all of those manuscripts to all of those agents fourteen months ago, I knew deep, deep (deeeeeeeeeeeeeeep) down that it was too long and that very fact would turn people off. And that a few scenes could probably be shortened and jokes deleted and plots sharpened. But at the time, I didn't care (stupid of me, but we all make mistakes). It was too fucking hard. I had on my rose-colored glasses, and I wasn't ready to take them off.

Now I'm actually ready to make those hard cuts. I didn't know that I was until I went about trying to age up my characters (a whole other blog post rant about that might be coming your way soon). But I noticed stuff that was redundant or just like...stupid, and I deleted it. Thought about it, congratulated myself on the milestone, and did it some more.

I also made me noticed something I really hate about the one formatting idea I had executed. Trying to think outside the box--sometimes it works, sometimes it takes you over a year to figure out it doesn't. Which, I mean, would have been great if I didn't realize it over 100 pages into revising it; so now I have to go back, again, and fix that before I can go forward and try to revise another thing that I noticed could use updated. 

Moral of the story, sometimes you have to murder your babies. It fucking sucks. It might take you a moment to be okay with it; it might take you over a year to be okay with it. But that's why you're supposed to let your work rest for a while (one of the many, many reasons).

*This popular writing advice is attributed to William Faulkner (but it's also the titled of a queer movie staring Daniel Radcliffe (that I still need to watch sometime))

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