You've poured your heart into this piece. You've come up with some really clever little ideas and used some truly masterful bits of writing to get them across. These short sentences, phrases and paragraph have become your darlings. Now you're being told to kill them off. Do you really have to?
Yes, I'm afraid, most of the time you do, actually.
It's often not because there is anything wrong with the particular “darling” itself. More usually it's that it's so good that it puts everything around it into a bad light. It just doesn't fit.
There are two ways of killing off your darling - you can either get rid of it, or bring all of the rest of your text up to the glorious heights of that elegant piece of prose with its clever phrasing. Not only is that really hard work, but chances are that if everything you wrote was so rich, your reader would suffer a form of excruciating verbal indigestion.
It doesn't need to be such a painful process. After all, you're not killing it forever. You're just taking it out of this particular piece of prose and saving it for another day. It may even turn out to be a stand alone quote which you might use for something.
“Killing off your darlings” is actually a very liberating process. You take you editors pen - I favour green - it's less shocking than red - and you boldly strike out all those little phrases, those complex images and those clever bits of wording, which, although fine in their proper place, have no business being here.
Isn't it a little like what happens in the garden? A weed is just a plant in the wrong place. A darling to be killed is just a word or a phrase or a whole paragraph out of place. As you cross out and prune away, your text becomes more elegant because it becomes more simple. You have to squash the ego of that talented writer who created the fine material and take the side of the text with you clear editor's / inner critic's voice.
When you've been ruthless enough, you might take out one more little snippet. Now you are like the French woman going out to dinner. First, she puts on all the jewellery that goes with her outfit. Then she takes it off piece by piece until she looks just right. Then she takes off one last brooch or necklace. Now she has it right. But there are still some baubles left, more often than not, just a single piece.
One darling is maybe all right.
I did worry recently when I read out a piece to a critique group. The book is now on its way to publication, so I must have got it right in the end. As I read:
The traffic slowed him down now. There was a storm going on inside him. Six months they'd been together and his stomach still churned every time before he went to meet her. The thought of seeing her still edged his days with gold. He was stopped at the traffic lights. He revved the bike to relieve some of the tension.
two of the other members of the group hastily wrote something down.
They don't like the “edged his days with gold” bit, I thought. Probably much too sentimental.
They loved it, actually, and that was why they'd written the note.
We need to be so thorough in our effort to annihilate those darlings that we even hesitate about the one jewel left behind. Okay, that bit was good in my piece. Even without it, though the text was solid enough to be published. I'm sure it would have been a different matter altogether if it had been peppered with the outpourings of an inflated ego.
