Killing My Darlings

Why revision is hard. (Or one of the reasons.)

Greetings!

Wishing all my readers many good tidings and good books for 2025.

On this end, over the last several weeks, I’ve been deep in revisions mode. By now, many versions into my current book project, it feels like I’ve formed a way-too-intimate relationship with my proverbial red pen (aka my Mac “delete” key, which may be about to give out soon).

More often than not, revising feels like slashing and burning. It feels like throwing out words that a past version of you tried to craft carefully, painstakingly, out of soaring hope (and perhaps some desperation) that this time will be the time you finally say what you want to say, in the way you want to say it.

Frankly, it takes a long time to say certain things in the way you want to say them. As I’ve said before in this newsletter, writing is rewriting, and this is always humbling.

Walking is Writing

It also can take a certain ruthlessness to revise: I may love these words that Past Me wrote sometime — either a very long time ago or last month — but now I can see that they are not working. They aren’t in the right place in the manuscript, or they don’t flow with the right cadence, or they don’t quite get at the ideas I want, or they aren’t really as clear as I’d hoped, or they don’t come alive in whatever other way.

Or maybe they’re simply superfluous. Fluff. No need for that. Slash. Burn. Dump in an extraneous Word document I’ve long taken to calling my “extracts,” in honor of a certain chapter in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. (What is the whale. Also, what are words.)

As I sit in front of my computer, I remember what my creative writing teachers in college would say about killing our darlings. Sure enough, as I revise, I’m doing a lot of killing.

One past writing view: sitting in the Boston Public Library on a rainy day in 2023, while doubtlessly writing some sentence I am now taking out

Kill your darlings: this feels like a very writerly phrase. It’s revision advice, and it refers to taking out the words (and sentences and paragraphs and ideas and plot points, and so on) that, as much as you might love them, just are not serving your purposes anymore.

I still remember how one college professor of mine, when we’d bring a new piece into his class to workshop, would tell us to find our very favorite sentence in it. And then to take this sentence out.

“Cross it out,” he told us, right there in class. Sometimes he’d have us cross out our favorite paragraphs, too.

And then he’d say: “Now go and revise it. Write your way through the new version. See what it turns into. It might be worse. Or it might even be better.”

I also still remember feeling aghast at this command, in a very youthful college-kid sort of way. What! That sentence was my favorite! It was the one I’d worked hardest on! The one I loved the most!

Well, exactly. This was my professor’s point. Sometimes I’d let myself become so attached to this sentence, to its certain textures or cadences or words, that I couldn’t see anything else, including the larger goals I had for the piece itself. Like some magpie, I’d just kept hoarding my favorite words away even though they didn’t fit there anymore.

Now my editor sometimes highlights the lines I most love, and she says: “Is this necessary?” Or she pushes me to reshape them in some way.

I think: “Ugh.” But often she’s right, just like my college professor was.

Revising is re-visioning, seeing something in a different way, asking yourself what else you might try to get where you want to go. And sometimes the “darlings” make us see our writing through a lover’s narrow vision. Which is sometimes why they can’t stay.

This is now what I’m doing with my book. I read back over sentences and paragraphs that, I swear, took me not just hours but perhaps weeks to get just right. (All right, not straight-up consecutive weeks, but still I do remember spending a whole lot of time twiddling with some of them.)

Past me is aggrieved, affronted, apologetic. And then: off with her head! The darling sentence (or paragraph, or section, or chunk of pages) goes away into “extracts.” Which is often my way of making peace with what I am doing, telling myself that I can always use my magpie-hoard of words for other purposes one day. Or I just save a new version of my draft document, make a side note to myself about it, and move on.

This is hard. I’m still wrestling with it, as I look at my last two chapters and realize they contain plenty of darlings. I still hate taking them out. Even if, whenever I look back over earlier versions of this manuscript (or anything else I’ve written), I realize how true this advice can be.

The so-called “beautiful sentence” was just stuck. It wasn’t helping me move along to what the piece finally wound up being. Or perhaps there was just a better place for it somewhere else. This happens often enough, too. Resurrection does happen.

So if you’re wrestling with “re-visioning” your own project, whether it’s written or not, take heart. This is what practice takes, and it’s what honing your ideas can be. I am also writing this advice to myself right now.

Over and out, since I’d better get back to more of my slashing and burning.