Kill those darlings.
We all know the cliché (actually, it was Faulkner, not Stephen King, who coined the phrase) and, accepting its wisdom, do our best to kill those beloveds no matter how much it hurts. Sentences, paragraphs, whole scenes – deleted, leaving a cleaner and stronger narrative.
Deleted from the story, but not from our laptops or minds. Many of us (okay, me, but I bet I’m not the only one) squirrel them away, hoping we’ll be able to squeeze them into a future manuscript.
Of course, that rarely works. Unless, by some amazing chance, a grandfather scene exactly like the one I just deleted is precisely what the new book needs, the darlings need to stay in their coffins.
However, there are other possibilities for this excised material if we abandon the idea of keeping our darlings intact as chunks of prose and consider, instead, what they indicate, arise from, and serve.
A good way to do that is by adjusting the lens and zooming in or out. Zooming in means identifying small bits of language that can be extracted from their context. An image, a descriptive detail, a noun or verb that captures a particular sensation – that may be all that’s worth saving from the passage.
In stockpiling these usable phrases, it’s important to note their referents so you’re clear about how they might be used later. Does a phrase denote arrogance, the experience of unexpected emotional softening, a sense of foreboding? Later, you might be searching for a way to convey that very quality, and you’ll have a private dictionary to turn to. Retaining the meaning, along with the words, also helps to check the tendency to insert a phrase where it doesn’t really belong, simply because you can’t stand not to use it somewhere – the hallmark of a soon-to-be-dead-again darling.
Zooming out, in contrast, means stepping back from the specifics of what you’ve written to its source. What was that grandfather scene really about? Was it remorse at having taken someone for granted, nostalgia for a sense of safety that’s no longer possible? Perhaps it was the yearning to be someone’s favorite again, or the memory of a child’s frustration in not understanding an older person’s allusions. What was the feeling at the scene’s core, and why did it matter to my character? What purpose did I think it would serve in the story?
These sensations, intentions, aversions, and desires are only accessible when you zoom out and view the passage from a wider perspective, letting the trees blur so you can see the forest – that is, ignoring the words so you can perceive their source.
You may not need to retain the specific words and sentences. Often, in fact, it’s best not to – since they can influence, limit, and obstruct your vision – but their source can become a wellspring for fresh material. By letting go of the verbal formulation and connecting, instead, with the origin of the deleted material, you’re free to discover new possibilities.
To give an example:
In my earlier now-abandoned novel, the adult daughter of the protagonist was writing a master’s thesis on Georgia O’Keeffe. The “reason” I had her doing that (ouch) was so I could sneak in a backstory scene in which the protagonist came upon O’Keeffe’s Black Iris and had a profoundly transformative experience. The adult daughter’s thesis served no real purpose in the story, however, nor did the museum scene. They were, appropriately, killed off.
Yet there was something about the O’Keeffe painting that stayed with me – something it implied and evoked that I needed to express. It noodled around in that murky in-between part of the brain where creativity often occurs and then burst into life unexpectedly a year later, providing the genesis for the (much better) novel I’m currently working on. Without that now-dead darling, the new novel wouldn’t exist.
Zooming in and zooming out are inverse processes. In the first, context is discarded, freeing the words from their moorings; the focus is narrow, precise. In the second, words themselves are discarded, freeing the intention that gave rise to them; the focus is wide, diffuse, not yet confined to a specific manifestation. In neither case is the “darling” preserved intact, in the hope of shoe-horning it into a new slot. We’ve all tried that, and it doesn’t work.
We need not adopt either strategy, of course. Darlings can stay dead. But that would be a shame, since they often contain much that’s of value. That’s why we love them.
Do you, like me, have a file of deleted material?
What life might the material still contain if you approach it in a fresh way?
About Barbara Linn Probst
Barbara Linn Probst is a writer, blogger, former teacher and therapist, and “serious amateur” pianist living on an historic dirt road in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her debut novel QUEEN OF THE OWLS launched in April 2020 from She Writes Press--the story of a woman’s search for wholeness framed around the art and life of Georgia O’Keeffe. QUEEN OF THE OWLS has garnered stellar advance praise and will be the May 2020 selection for the Pulpwood Queens, a network of nearly 800 book clubs across the U.S. It was also named one of the most anticipated books of 2020 by Working Mother. Her second novel is slated for publication in April 2021. Before switching to fiction, Barbara published two nonfiction books and more scholarly articles than she cares to remember. She’s proudest of WHEN THE LABELS DON’T FIT (Random House, 2008), a book to help parents raise, understand, and nurture out-of-the-box children. An out-of-the-box child herself, Barbara has a PhD in Clinical Social Work and worked for many years counseling, teaching, doing qualitative research, and advocating for people with mental and emotional challenges.
I love the insight behind this post: After you’ve been brave enough to hack your darlings out of your ms., it’s okay if you don’t permanently delete those sentences. You’re not hoarding. (But how does Ms. Probst remember what’s in each of her darlings? )
Hi Fran – Anna offered some great suggestions in her comment. (Thanks, Anna!) Indeed, there are as many ways to organize and store one’s hibernating darlings as there are ways to keep track of story ideas. I do recommend an external system that’s accessible and cross-referenced so that a particular item can be located in more than one “bin” (for more than one possible use, later).
And yes, we have to be brave!
Hi Barbara: Good to hear from a local author from Westchester County, Hudson Valley where I live too. I like your zooming-in and zooming-out examples.
Thanks, Paula! The metaphor (zooming in and out) feels useful to me, so I’m glad it’s useful to you too!
What wonderful advice! I started keeping an “OUT” file after hearing a speaker at Writer Outboxed two years ago suggest it and it has come in handy in precisely the ways you mention. Likewise, I also have a file with “phrases” that just came to me, no connection to the current WIP, but that expressed a particular sensation or feeling and might be able to be used sometime along the way. Zooming in and zooming out – a great addition to my writer’s craft knowledge. Thanks.
Thanks, Maggie. I like your point about re-naming those darlings and putting them in the more generic category of “stuff I might want to use some time” — regardless of whether they were extracted from something you’ve already written or simply images, sentences, bits of dialogue, and even whole scenes that appear on their own. Not everything has to be used right now!
Hello Barbara,
Your post takes up an issue with which all those at Writer Unboxed are probably familiar: the bon mots, flashing insights and images–say, a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe–or epiphanic visitations from the muse that turn out to be all wrong for the project at hand. As you say, it makes sense to stash all these things away for future reference.
But I would offer the following caution: beware the strong wish to save something you like, your darlings. Whether it involves zooming in or out, some of us are susceptible to “anality issues.” Some of us are capable of marshaling all our wit and wisdom to find a way to justify keeping what we have fallen in love with (and if you think this has an autobiographical ring to it, in terms of both life and art, you aren’t wrong). Sometimes–probably much more often than not–a mallet and sharp wooden stake is what’s needed.
Thanks for your well-written and useful post.
Hi Barry – Great point. We have to know ourselves. Some of us, as you note, have a tendency to save everything and have gotten very good at finding “reasons” to do so. Other people have the opposite tendency — to prune and toss too readily — and may regret it later, when the very thing we wished we could pull up can no longer be retrieved. So I think you add a useful element to the discussion, which is to be aware of one’s individual tendency and consciously work to err on the other side. Thanks!
Excellent reminder that any bit of inspiration may well fit somewhere, just not the current WIP. The mind is a wonderful thing and comes up with all sorts of irrelevancies. We need to welcome them in and give them a hospitable home, so we can let them stretch themselves, associate with one another, perhaps even marry and multiply while we aren’t looking.
How to give them homes? (1) a file, (2) a notebook, or (3, my favorite for seeming irrelevancies that strike unawares) 3×5 cards, which can be tucked away, filed in any way that makes sense or not filed at all, sorted through later, brought out at any time for Zooming in and Zooming out.
Thanks for the practical addition to the conversation, Anna. As you’ll see, I referenced your terrific suggestions in my reply to Fran. I also appreciate your point about letting these darlings “associate with each other.” An unusable tidbit may shed fresh light on something else; in that way, though it may never be used as a stand-alone sentence or scene, its value may lie in how it adds fuller life to another passage or character. Fascinating how that tends to work!
Always good advice, yet its origin goes back a bit farther than Faulkner:
But the earliest known example of the phrase is not from any of these writers, but rather Arthur Quiller-Couch, who spread it in his widely reprinted 1913-1914 Cambridge lectures “On the Art of Writing.” In his 1914 lecture “On Style,” he said, while railing against “extraneous Ornament”:
If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
Ah – thanks, Ed! It’s great to know that the precept goes back more than a century. Probably the Egyptian writing teachers told their students to do the same thing with their scrolls and papyri!
A private dictionary? Wow. Never thought of that. It’s like recycling cardboard boxes and plastic bottles. Why waste them when they can be refashioned into bigger boxes and police barricades?
And zooming out…yes, I get you. A deleted passage or whole scene had a purpose, just one that wasn’t clear. The act of deleting itself is an opportunity: What was I trying to capture?
Good advice, many thanks. BTW, your book When the Labels Don’t Fit is big in our house. We’ve got two kids with known issues but with unique spins. Thanks for that too.
Dear Benjamin – Thank you for the extra gift of letting me know that my nonfiction work has helped your family! It doesn’t get any better than knowing that what one has written and offered to the world – fiction or nonfiction – has touched others in an enduring way.
Good points. Mine are put into a file called “Extra”. But I might be adding more to that file after reading this blog!
Hi Carol,
Good to put those babies into a special file, but it might be interesting to divide it into several sub-files, each with a different heading. That allows you to skim through and re-consider more purposefully. A bit more work on the “input” end, but more potential on the “output” end!
Thanks, Barbara. I love this post. I have a dead darling file for each of my books, and I really appreciate the spot on tip of looking at the content in a new way. My publisher had suggested using deleted scenes as bonus content for followers, but really, the scenes were deleted for good reason. As an alternative, I’ll give them another once over to see if I can use some of the phrases or sentiments.
Yes, this reminds me of those movie DVDs that show deleted scenes—you can always tell why they were deleted, and you wonder how seeing them now enhances the value of the DVD! An entire subplot, such as the one Barbara mentions here, is rarer than other sorts of deleted scenes, I’d guess, but a potential gem.
Love the zoom in/put distinction, Barbara!
Hi Kathryn
You and Jennifer make a similar point (see my reply to her). Deleted means deleted, and there’s no extra benefit to viewing (or reading) what didn’t work or wasn’t needed … in that context.
It’s also useful to take a deleted phrase, sentence, paragraph, or scene, and try both zooming in AND zooming out. Each may yield a different, unexpected result!
Hi Jennifer –
“Deleted for good reason” – yup, Kathryn’s comment (just below yours) echoes the sentiment. But the full phrase is probably: “deleted from this chapter or novel for good reason.” You prompt me to say that one ought to add a tagline to each saved darling — e.g. “description of someone who wants to erupt in anger but is holding it in” — so one can retrieve it for later use, where appropriate, rather than having to scroll through a ton of stored phrases without a clear aim.
And I agree with you, not your publisher about the “bonus scenes” idea! Glad you loved the post!
of COURSE i save them, right there in the folder with the, uh, living MS. and of COURSE it’s always in the hope of using it SOMEwhere later in the story. but, as stories are wont to do (and especially for pantzers like myself) the story goes where it must, leaving the dead little darlings in their digital file folder coffins – even if they are still cracked open…
Hi Robin,
You raise an interesting point about the role of these dead, hibernating, and resurrected darlings for pantsers versus plotters (though many of us fall somewhere in-between), although all stories seem to evolve, and all writers have to be alert for sentences and images that we’re overly-attached to.
I like your image of the coffin remaining cracked open — the possibility always there!
Love this post! I had to learn to kill my darlings, but once I did I started putting them in a separate Scrivener folder. One scene I looooved was told from the point of view of a character that has no business telling her own story in this story. I’m going to use that as bonus material for buyers once the book is out. But a lot of my darlings had to go in the trash because their only purpose was me showing off how much research I’ve done – which would be a great way to bore the readers to death. I can’t think of a way I could possibly use them, unless my sales go through the roof and I need to discourage people from buying the book. ;)
It took me a while to stop defending my darlings from the editor and start to actually listen to her suggestions, but once I learned that I started to cut them left, right, and centre. (No, not too many. I think.)
Hi Bjorn,
I absolutely agree with you about having to do your research – thoroughly – but not including every single fact and factoid in the actual manuscript! The research provides a grounding, an informed perspective, a field from which you can draw specific flowers (where needed).
You’ll see that Jennifer’s publisher also suggested “Bonus scenes” so I think that’s a great topic for another conversation on this site! It may be useful to do that with extra research but perhaps not with the “deleted scenes” that we see at the end of DVDs, as Kathryn referred to. So that’s another great question!