It's awfully confusing to hear, “Write what you love,” in the same breath as “Kill your darlings." Taken literally, I’m supposed to love my work and then slaughter anything I love. Jeez, no wonder this industry is so hard to break into - it doesn’t even know what it wants.

For me there are concepts and characters that I love and I would rather kill a manuscript than strike them down (see also: Stupid Hill). On the other hand, I know there are darlings that can spoil so rotten that they ruin the good things in a story.

How does one know what these spoiled darlings are? After all, our words are like our offspring and we can easily be blinded and miss the fact that we’re raising a real stinker. The following list is just some of the red flags I look out for in my own work.

I’ve got a spoiled darling on my hands when…

• I’m bending over backwards to make a scene work around a specific line or paragraph, instead of changing the wording to make it fit with the scene.
• I'm writing longer dialogue or extra scenes simply because I like the character so much or I want to explain a cool concept/technology/theory just because it’s cool.
• I'm repeating the same excuse when the forth critiquer asks me about the story’s need for XX or YY.
• I'm cutting and pasting a scene in a few different places in the manuscript and it works no where.

What are some indications of a dirty, rotten darling that you’ve noticed?

This week, we’ve been talking about killing your darlings. You writers know what this term refers to, right? Basically it means that you shouldn’t treat your own writing as precious. Sometimes your best phrases or paragraphs, or even scenes, just don’t serve the work, no matter how much you love them. No matter how brilliant you think they are. If they don’t fit, they must go.

Earlier this week, I found my old sketchbooks from around the time I was in art school and afterward, when art was what I did full time. This background helped me in many ways as a writer, but in particular with this idea of writing Darlings.

As an oil painter, you learn very early on that you can overwork a painting. In the art world, when you add too much of this color or fuss too much that part of the painting, you get mud. That’s the term that’s used because, quite exactly, when you mix enough paint together, no matter what the colors are there, you eventually get this brownish, swampish looking color.

What I strived for when I painted was to have a light, but sure hand. You can revise in painting but the integrity of the thing is delicate. Revise too much and you look like you don’t know what you’re doing. Revise too much and your intent can suffer.

This is the exact opposite of what happens in writing. Writing is revising. And revising is about getting the mud out of your writing.

As writers we have endless canvases--A blank canvas is just a click away. Take advantage of that. Don’t protect your Darlings. (Save them in another file, yes, but don’t be afraid that you’ll lose them forever. You won’t. I promise.) Be daring. Take risks. If you muddy something up, take a step back. Open a new file. Revise. Keep what you like. Write material you’ll love even more.

Your masterpiece is just waiting for you.

I understand the concept of throwing out scenes that aren't moving the story forward.  Hell, I've thrown out nearly entire drafts for some of my revisions.  I can flat out kill those big ole chunks of manuscript with the best of them. 

I have a harder time with my literary darlings.  Those little lines that evoke an image or theme, that snappy piece of dialogue that made me laugh when I wrote it.  I figure if I love it, maybe someone else will love it too.

But then, I am an overwriter.  And old habits are hard to break.

Really hard.

Sometimes I just can't stop myself.

I get really attached to those little suckers.  That little bitty adverb isn't hurting anyone, is it?  And that metaphor about adrenaline junkies?  It seemed so perfect at the time.
  
I mean how do you know when a adjective is just right, or when it crosses the line into overwrought prose that weighs the story down?  It's hard step far enough back to gain some objectivity and still be able to make out the individual trees in the forest well enough to trim with any precision.  (What? Too much?)

My solution:  The Darling Hitman.

Yes, that's right, I delegate my wet work.  I rely on a trusted reader to point out when a line isn't working or when I get carried away.  For a small fee, usually involving wine, this reader will mark up my manuscript with a red pen, and invariably point out lines that are repetitive, boring, or just plain overdone.

But I don't give my hitman carte blanche.  I use his feedback to direct me to lines that need a second look.  My hitman knows his stuff, so most of the time, I make the cut.  Occasionally, I review a line and decide that there is a justification for keeping it.  Ultimately, the decision of whether a line lives or dies is still mine, but I find I can be more objective when someone else calls it out.

And what the hitman doesn't catch?  My line editor usually will.

Even then, I have been known to fight to keep a line that I love.

In Silver, when Brianna's meets two supernatural characters that talk like stoners, she makes this observation:  "So apparently, Harold and Kumar go to the spirit realm."  This line cracked me up when I wrote it, and it came in a lighter scene where humor was needed.  My line editor suggested we cut it because she wasn't sure it was working.

Was the line necessary to the scene?  No.  It could easily be cut. And that right there is the dilemma.  Sometimes, those "darlings" are what give your writing that elusive quality known as voice.  I loved that line, and I trusted that readers would too.  So I kept it.  And I don't regret it.

There is another scene in Silver where a character describes a sexual incident involving another character.  It's shocking to some readers (although it was realistic to me) and I knew it would be.  The hitman suggested it was too "loud" and, I could accomplish the goal of the scene (revealing the character of the two participants) another way.  I decided I liked it the way it was, but would reconsider if any of my editors raised it as an issue.  They never did, and the scene remained unchanged.  Now, I'm second-guessing myself, wondering if the choice was worth alienating some more conservative readers.  I still don't know if I made the right decision, but I still love that little scene.  No regrets there either.

So, while I think it is important to take a close look at your work and make decisions about whether every line or word needs to be there, the decision is still yours.  Do solicit feedback from people who can be more objective than you.  Do pay careful attention to said feedback, taking a close look at the issues described.  Then make a judgment call.  If you decide to keep the line anyway, make sure you understand why.  Then move on.

I'll get to this week's topic in just a minute, but wanted to repeat the special announcement Donna made yesterday about an upcoming week on the YAMuses blog.  

We're going to feature our "reader request" week for September 3rd and we need to hear from YOU!  What questions do you have for the Muses?  What topics would you like to see covered?  Please comment on today's post (or any post this week) and mention what you'd like to discuss with us.

This week we're talking about killing our darlings.  It's such a bittersweet term, isn't it?  It smacks of infanticide and "tough love."  And that horrible sentence, "This is going to hurt me much more than it hurts you."  Or the even worse one, "It's not you, it's me."  What about the poor darlings?  What about their feelings?  What happens to them after?

I can't speak to everyone's darlings.  Donna puts hers in a coma.  Bret has a graveyard.  But what about the darlings that just can't be reused?  What about my scene with Anne of Cleves, so happy and hopeful on her triumphant (and ultimately ill-fated) journey into London as Queen?  What do you do with that?

Well, you can reuse it in a blog post, I suppose.

Or just use those darlings in a different way.  Because there is a life after death for darlings, I am a firm believer.  They may just be shapeshifters, ghosts, or reincarnations.

Let me explain by telling a story.  More than a year and a half ago, I was compiling ideas for Book 2 of my series.  Trying out and discarding historical sequences.  Skidding around the idea of historical characters.  Unsure what to settle on or how to approach it all.  Flailing a little, but happily still.  Composting, as Donna says.

I drove my kids up to see my parents for Thanksgiving.  This is a five-to-six hour journey, depending on how many times we have to stop for bathroom breaks/letting the dog out/coffee/carsickness/roadworks.  But things had settled down and the music was playing softly, the dog was snoring and the kids nearly so.  And a voice came to me (yes, just like that.) Like Joan of Arc only these weren't voices telling me what to do, this was the voice of a character.  Begging to be written.  This girl had a voice that can only be described as sassy and the comments she made about the English court and the fashion choices and over-inflated egos of some of its inmates made me fall in love with her.  This was the character I needed to write.  This character had something to say.

I pulled out my index cards at the next roadworks and jotted down some of my ideas.  Some of her observations.  Already formulating the first chapter.  Submerging the reader in her voice at the get-go.

Are you ready for this?  I never keep a first chapter.  I often write a keeper of a first chapter after the third or fourth revision.  So all those observations?  Those snappy little snarky remarks?  Gone with the darlings.

What remained was the voice.  I knew she could make those snappy comebacks.  I knew what she thought of the people around her, even if she didn't vocalize it (all the time).  I knew how she felt about her own presence at court and about the attitudes of everyone else.  All of that remained.  That voice was the true darling.  Not what she said, but how she said it.

There is life after death for darlings.  Because in this business, nothing is ever wasted.

A recent hike up in Rocky Mountain National Park

I'll get to this week's topic in just a minute, but wanted to make a special announcement about an upcoming week on the YAMuses blog.  

We're going to feature our "reader request" week for September 3rd and we need to hear from YOU!  What questions do you have for the Muses?  What topics would you like to see covered?  Please comment on today's post (or any post this week) and mention what you'd like to discuss with us.



Now on to the murder of our little preciouses.

‘Kill your darlings’ is advice from William Faulkner (supposedly); the full quote is “In writing, you must kill your darlings”.  Others say it came from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings.”

I don't think it means to cut out all  the tidbits of writing you especially love, but rather to not get SO attached to the actual words, or characters, that you can't see the bigger picture - it isn't working in the main story.

Let me give you a couple of examples.  I am re-reading SKINNY for the UK page proofs.  First of all, it took me a long time to open the document.  There was something daunting about re-reading it in a "final" format.  But when I did, I found some fun surprises.  There were these paragraphs... bits of dialogue...character descriptions...I completely forgot I wrote and absolutely loved.  I'm so glad I didn't cut them at the time thinking they were "my darlings." 

 On the other hand, in drafting my second novel I tried to include bits and pieces of "drawer" writing.  (I write very sparse and slow on a first draft, so I was thrilled to have saved chunks of previously unused text to plug into my current story.)  It immediately upped the word count and effortlessly added scenes and characters.  Unfortunately, most of it didn't fit.  It wasn't that the writing was so bad (okay, sometimes it was), but it wasn't right for THIS story.  My little bits of "writing darlings" had to stay in the drawer and they soon had other writing friends join them.


I personally don't believe in killing off any writing with potential.  Even if it is never right for a story, it might still be the word or phrase that inspires something different and better. 

 So, if it doesn't fit for now, save it.  

Just maybe put those little darlings in a coma?