Murdering a very big darling.
Jan. 8th, 2009 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_rose"Murder your Darlings" is a standard piece of writer's advice. It's sometimes controversial, and not just in the "Any advice can be taken too far" way of advice like "look for active verbs" and "minimize use of adverbs."
Essentially, it means be ruthless in your editing, and no matter how pretty the sentence or how much you love it, if it's only there to be pretty, cut it out.
Which is why it's controversial. I have seen it taken to the extreme where, if any sentence has anything remotely ornamental about it, or any particularly nice phrasing at all, it must be cropped until it's stark, and that's ridiculous. But even at its base advice level, this piece of advice encourages a specific kind of bare prose. And not everyone is, or wants to be, creating that sort of text. (I'm closer to it than to the ornamental style, but even I'm not there.)
It doesn't have to be taken to even that level, though, for all it implies it. For one, Define "Only there to be pretty". A sentence that happens to be pretty but also happens to define character, show action, and feed the reader essential information, is not "Only" there to be pretty.
Second, no matter how pretty, there are sentences that not only cannot, but msut not die. A Sentence of the sort that Jo Walton calls a "spearpoint" (Here), or Elizabeth Bear describes as a hard beat (here) pretty much can't be murdered without murdering the story, which is a sin of such overwhelming size that leaving in a clunky sentence or a florid one, by contrast, is as nothing. (Although chances are, a hard beat will not be clunky. And now I have a sudden urge to reread the Fionavar Tapestry).
Third, creation of a consistent voice for a narrator might demand, not merely suggest, using a more complex and pretty phrasing. (Steven Brust's Khaavren Romances could not survive without Paarfi's stuffy turns of speech.)
For another, sometimes in my most ruthless editing, I am cropping cliche and replacing it with action that actually describes something a character would actually do, a gesture both familiar and not yet cliched. Which both fits the advice - be ruthless - and ends up sometimes with something slightly more complex than what it replaced.
I have, however, also caught myself sometimes trying to compromise on my editing, so I can leave a phrase or paragraph in. I leave a couple of clunky phrases clunky because they happen to set up the one sentence that is 'pretty', better than the corrected version. Or left all kinds of scaffolding on the surface. Or had a character say/do something slightly out of character just so the other could respond with that perfect line --
-- which is to say, WRONG. better to murder the darling and make the whole scene smooth, the character act according to their nature. This is the intent of the advice. To not warp the story in service to the words. The words serve the story. The reverse is, pardon me, wanking.
I mention this because I just hit a doozy.
I just hit the scene that was probably my very favourite in all the last completed draft of Bird of Dusk. It did everything right; the characters revealed themselves through actions, made friction, conflict, and revelations, the prose was slick and lacked cliches, the pacing and rhythm were down.
I can't use more than a sentence or two in the new version. A major hurtful action, a big character moment, can't happen as written, half the information is already known, the time of day and location have changed. Heck, the amount of clothes each one is wearing throughout has been altered, too. (Um...yeah. I probably shouldn't have admitted that.)
But when I realised how much the new build-up had altered, I started to consider. I could cut this bit of dialogue, move this, have this character not say the obvious thing here, even though the situation is urgent, and not mentioning it would be idiotic in the wrong way...
... which is when I really understood what 'murder your darlings' means. The new set-up is better. Stronger. It makes one of the characters much more three dimensional, and moves faster into the action and revelation. And the scene that I can build to replace my darling one could also be faster, sharper, better. It might also fall apart, I admit. But chances are, it will be stronger. I can't afford to leave the old one intact just because I liked it so much.
And Now I'm left with a nagging suspicion that i might have another similar one looming; a place where the set-up (which happened a chapter ago) was left clunky so the big scene (Coming up next chapter - basically bracketing the current darling) could go on as written. I'm undecided on that one. This is so going to need a fresh beta reader or two when I hit the end.
We don't think of "murder your darlings" as scene level advice. We think of it as all about sentences, and adverbs. Apparently, it is that, too.
Ah, well. Soldiering on.
*And yes, it only applies to the prose darlings. Not the real world ones.
Essentially, it means be ruthless in your editing, and no matter how pretty the sentence or how much you love it, if it's only there to be pretty, cut it out.
Which is why it's controversial. I have seen it taken to the extreme where, if any sentence has anything remotely ornamental about it, or any particularly nice phrasing at all, it must be cropped until it's stark, and that's ridiculous. But even at its base advice level, this piece of advice encourages a specific kind of bare prose. And not everyone is, or wants to be, creating that sort of text. (I'm closer to it than to the ornamental style, but even I'm not there.)
It doesn't have to be taken to even that level, though, for all it implies it. For one, Define "Only there to be pretty". A sentence that happens to be pretty but also happens to define character, show action, and feed the reader essential information, is not "Only" there to be pretty.
Second, no matter how pretty, there are sentences that not only cannot, but msut not die. A Sentence of the sort that Jo Walton calls a "spearpoint" (Here), or Elizabeth Bear describes as a hard beat (here) pretty much can't be murdered without murdering the story, which is a sin of such overwhelming size that leaving in a clunky sentence or a florid one, by contrast, is as nothing. (Although chances are, a hard beat will not be clunky. And now I have a sudden urge to reread the Fionavar Tapestry).
Third, creation of a consistent voice for a narrator might demand, not merely suggest, using a more complex and pretty phrasing. (Steven Brust's Khaavren Romances could not survive without Paarfi's stuffy turns of speech.)
For another, sometimes in my most ruthless editing, I am cropping cliche and replacing it with action that actually describes something a character would actually do, a gesture both familiar and not yet cliched. Which both fits the advice - be ruthless - and ends up sometimes with something slightly more complex than what it replaced.
I have, however, also caught myself sometimes trying to compromise on my editing, so I can leave a phrase or paragraph in. I leave a couple of clunky phrases clunky because they happen to set up the one sentence that is 'pretty', better than the corrected version. Or left all kinds of scaffolding on the surface. Or had a character say/do something slightly out of character just so the other could respond with that perfect line --
-- which is to say, WRONG. better to murder the darling and make the whole scene smooth, the character act according to their nature. This is the intent of the advice. To not warp the story in service to the words. The words serve the story. The reverse is, pardon me, wanking.
I mention this because I just hit a doozy.
I just hit the scene that was probably my very favourite in all the last completed draft of Bird of Dusk. It did everything right; the characters revealed themselves through actions, made friction, conflict, and revelations, the prose was slick and lacked cliches, the pacing and rhythm were down.
I can't use more than a sentence or two in the new version. A major hurtful action, a big character moment, can't happen as written, half the information is already known, the time of day and location have changed. Heck, the amount of clothes each one is wearing throughout has been altered, too. (Um...yeah. I probably shouldn't have admitted that.)
But when I realised how much the new build-up had altered, I started to consider. I could cut this bit of dialogue, move this, have this character not say the obvious thing here, even though the situation is urgent, and not mentioning it would be idiotic in the wrong way...
... which is when I really understood what 'murder your darlings' means. The new set-up is better. Stronger. It makes one of the characters much more three dimensional, and moves faster into the action and revelation. And the scene that I can build to replace my darling one could also be faster, sharper, better. It might also fall apart, I admit. But chances are, it will be stronger. I can't afford to leave the old one intact just because I liked it so much.
And Now I'm left with a nagging suspicion that i might have another similar one looming; a place where the set-up (which happened a chapter ago) was left clunky so the big scene (Coming up next chapter - basically bracketing the current darling) could go on as written. I'm undecided on that one. This is so going to need a fresh beta reader or two when I hit the end.
We don't think of "murder your darlings" as scene level advice. We think of it as all about sentences, and adverbs. Apparently, it is that, too.
Ah, well. Soldiering on.
*And yes, it only applies to the prose darlings. Not the real world ones.
