| Image Source |
This quote by William Faulkner urges the writer to edit out phrases, characters, scenes, paragraphs or sentences that are their Darlings when they don't serve a purpose.
Stephen King uses this quote in his book ‘On Writing’ to emphasize this major editing technique.
Writers often fall in love with their creation. Many of us consider our books as our babies.
When an editor asks you to cut some of your favorite scenes, you might raise a hue and cry. It is one terrible thing to do.
You might even be tempted to look for another opinion.
But the reality is that removing our darlings from the manuscript often strengthens our characters and plot.
It also tightens the prose thus improving the overall quality of our writing.
What are the darlings you can edit out without much thought from your manuscript?
- Put on your thinking cap and weed out the weak characters, irrelevant plot lines, flowery metaphors, and similes.
- Check whether the many backstories actually matter.
- Would your story work fine if you cut your prologue?
- Are there pointless scenes in your book that isn’t interesting at all?
- Is your first chapter relevant? Read through your first chapter. By the time you finish your manuscript, the first chapter might require a thorough revamp as the story might have changed from what you initially had in mind.
While you Kill off your darlings, make sure you are doing it in a separate copy of your manuscript.
You never know, you might want to revive a few of your darlings later on.
Another way authors kill their darlings is by killing off one of their strong characters.
Seems bizarre, right?
For example, author George R R Martin kills off many of his stronger and well-loved characters in his international bestselling series of epic fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, adapted by HBO into the dramatic series Game of Thrones.
JK Rowling kills at least one character off in each of her Harry Potter books.
I died a little when Dumbledore died.
The deaths of Sirius, Mad eyed moody, Hedwig, Dobby, Tonks and Lupin, Snape, Fred and many other characters make the books so much poignant and un-putdownable. We empathize with the loss faced by our favorites.
By killing off these darlings, J.K Rowling ensured they will live in our hearts forever.
And not to forget, don’t we all love Romeo and Juliet?
Now the big question! Will you be ready to kill your darlings?
During this A-Z April Challenge, I am exploring the A-Z journey of writing a Novel with examples from Literature.
The Letter of the day is H
Linking this post to Blogging from A-Z
and Blogchatter
Have you read the Letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H I J ?
This post first appeared on Preethi Venugopala- A Writer's Oasis, please read the originial post: here
