Saturday 14 March 2020

Kill your darlings

I am omitting the very sad bit I had planned for later but this section, I think, isn't sad enough to create a blip in the reader's enjoyment, but simply adds some background, and helps us to understand the characters more.

I am now - amazingly - on 85,692 words, and still have a largish chunk to write. This means it will be significantly longer than volume one unless I decide a huge amount of editing - in the deleting sense - is necessary.

We shall see. I am not good at editing. There is a famous quote you have probably heard often used by writing teachers: kill your darlings, meaning get rid of all those precious but unnecessary words. I find that hard. Maybe that is why I am not a best-selling famous author.

As to the origin of the quote there seems to be some confusion. Was it Stephen King? He definitely wrote it in his book, On Writing, but was he quoting William Faulkner? Or was it originally 'murder your darlings' as said by Sir Arthur Quiller-Cough in a lecture towards the beginning of the twentieth century?

Whoever first said it is irrelevant to the reader but it remains desperately painful to the writer.




2 comments:

  1. And I think it applies, not only to unnecessary words, but also to unneeded characters, plot points, etc etc. But you could always model yourself on Herman Melville, who never met a digression he didn't love.

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  2. True. I shall get it finished and then start trying to edit it.

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