We’ve all heard the expression: Kill your darlings. If you’ve been writing for any length of time—five minutes or thirty years, you know what that expression means. Or what it implies. I say implies, because a lot of beginning writers know what it means but think they’re the exception to the rule. They (you) are not the exception. If you haven’t heard the expression, this is the gist: no matter how great you think a character, a plotline, a scene, a line of dialogue, a setting, or whatever in your writing is, if it doesn’t advance the plot or add to character, you’ve got to kill it. You’ve got to put a big red (or black or green or whatever color) X over it and keep on going. Writing in Word? Cross it out or delete it. Your fiction will be better for it, even if it pains you to do so. What you leave out of your novel is more important than what you live in.
See, the thing about writing is you don’t need everything. Writers who take writing seriously understand that it’s a process. That it’s work. That the end goal is to produce something worthy, something of value, something of entertainment that readers will enjoy. It isn’t to show off all the cool or antiquated or “big” words you know. It isn’t to show how clever you are, or to call attention to the writing; writing fiction is about telling a story. It’s about creating something that readers can dive into, get lost in, and hopefully enjoy. Are there themes you want to inject into your fiction? Probably. But you don’t have to bash your readers over their heads with it. Themes will come naturally from the story you’re telling. Is there a message you’re trying to get across? Well, good writing will provide that. You don’t have to have a character give a monologue about the dangers of fascism or babies eating rice cakes or climate change and fishermen killing vaquitas (a critically endangered species of porpoise of which there are about ten left in existence). Your goal is to write a first draft, put it away for a bit, bring it back out, and then revise and rewrite and cut what needs cutting. Think of your novel as a piece of clay: the clay is your book and your job is to shape it into a statue or a mug or a paperweight by taking pieces of clay away and molding the clay into your final product.
I’ll give you an example. I’m currently working on a novel that I started at the beginning of 2016. That’s nine years. Nine. Not a short amount of time, but, if you’ve ever researched how long it takes some other writers to write, it’s nothing anyone would find outrageous. I’ve written first drafts in three weeks, and others in six months. Some have taken me years. Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks. It took Margaret Mitchell ten years to write Gone with the Wind. J.R.R. Tolkien took sixteen years to write The Lord of the Rings. Writers should take as long as it takes them to make sure they’ve done the best job they can. That includes having other readers providing them feedback, editorial assistance, perhaps agent assistance, etc. And that’s all prior to having the acquiring editor providing their input.
But back to the novel I’m working on. I wrote the first draft of it in three weeks. If you’ve read previous posts of mine, you’ll know that I’ve been revising it every few months since then. At this point, you’d think I’d have it pretty close to wrapped up. Maybe I do, maybe I don’t—I don’t really know. What I do know is that I’ve killed more darlings than there are books in my library—and I have a lot of books. It’s just my process. The novel I’m writing is about a subject I’m passionate about—politics. But I don’t want to preach. That’s not what novels are about. That’s what nonfiction is about, and even then, not so much. The novel is just over five hundred pages currently. My goal is to get it down to about three hundred pages, which is sort of the standard acquiring editors and agents want the novel to be, or about 100,000 words. The only way I’m getting there is by editing/revising/killing my darlings (or, my new favorite term, “erasing,” as my lady friend calls it). So, that’s what I’m doing. And, as you can see in the below image, I’m being ruthless. (As an FYI, this is probably the fiftieth edit of my novel, which many writers find ridiculous. I don’t. I edit and revise, rewrite and cut until I don’t see anything that needs editing or revising or cutting. Or, at least, that I believe doesn’t).
Writing first drafts or second drafts or fiftieth drafts are us figuring out what the story is and how best to tell it. It’s carving with a sharp knife. It’s taking a word here, or a paragraph there, or a character from the entire work, and asking ourselves this: is this necessary to the novel or the story? What happens if it disappears? Is anything compromised? Does it damage what I’m trying to do? If the answer is no, then you know you can get rid of it. Kit Reed, author of such works as At War as Children, Fort Privilege, Thief of Lives, Wired Women, and other works, puts it like this:
Novelists are permitted occasional indulgences because the stage they occupy may be as intimate as a theater-in-the-round or large enough to accommodate a cast of thousands including elephants, but a writer of short stories has a relative space the approximate size of a puppet stage, and if he lets things get out of control he will end up knocking over scenery and threatening the entire arrangement with collapse.
--Kit Reed
And I agree. Yet still, those indulgences need be kept to a minimum. Overwriting is something we see novelists getting away with often, but it does the author no favors. It’s a turn off for many readers, because anything that makes the reader pause, anything that makes them hesitate from moving on, becomes a bump in the road for that reader, and it risks having the reader put the book down. It wastes their time. It’s extraneous, and readers want to follow a path, a plot; they do not want to meander around that path because an author didn’t find it prudent to cut out the unnecessary. If you’ve studied writing, or gotten an MFA, you’re very familiar with overwriting. This isn’t to say some readers don’t enjoy books that are overwritten, only that I believe the majority of readers are looking for a story, not a forest of words they have to make their way through.
So, here’s what I’ll leave you with:
If a character doesn’t add value to the novel, remove him/her
If a plotline doesn’t add to the main plot in some way, get rid of it
If a scene doesn’t advance the plot, remove it
If dialogue isn’t working or repeats itself (unless it’s a stylistic choice), erase it
If you find your characters or the narrator preaching to the reader, cut it
Remember, just because something doesn’t need to be in one novel, doesn’t mean it can’t be in another one. Have a scene you love? Maybe it’ll work in your next novel or the one you wrote a year ago. Same with a plotline, a character, dialogue, whatever. I once wrote a short story cycle about a WWII bomber pilot. My thesis adviser told me it should be a novel, and that I should get rid of all of the war stuff (I’d researched for years about WWII, interviews a Liberator pilot, read countless books, etc.). But he was right. I took the war stuff out and the novel improved. But I didn’t get rid of the war stuff. I still have it. And I will, eventually, use it. Because I think it’s damned good. But I’m a writer. I take my writing seriously. And sometimes that means pulling stuff out to make something better.
Cully Perlman is an author, blogger, and substantive editor. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com
Cully, as usual, I found this column enjoyable. I struggle with the opposite problem: my novels are short (the product of being a lifelong journalist) and perhaps too lean. Maybe I need more darlings!