"Kill Your Darlings"

Wordsmith

Bai Juyi, one of China’s greatest poets, was born in 722 during the Middle Tang dynasty. He predates William Faulkner by more than 1,000 years in expressing the sentiment, “Kill your darlings.” Juyi wrote over 2,800 poems, many of them concerning social progress and according to Wikipedia he was “considered the leader of the somewhat angry, bitter, speaking-truth-to-power New Yuefu Movement.”

This may be one reason Juyi preferred to keep his writing simple, using a folk style for the common man. This style focused on the reader’s experience instead of inflating the writer’s ego or displaying polished skill. He admonished fellow writers to “Delete beautiful diction.”

There is general agreement that Faulkner’s intent in the admonishment to “Kill your darlings,” was to encourage writers to eliminate characters, scenes, chapters or even brilliant sentences that refuse to fit the flow of the narrative and that do not serve the overall context or may not be essential to the story. Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. is a writer’s guidebook, revered by some for providing needed guidelines and held in distain by others for its rigidity. It advises:

“Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but make every word tell.”

As we comb through our manuscripts or other projects with an affectionate gaze at any of our especially hard won pinnacles of brilliance, our personal biases may act as blinders. Ruthanne Reid gives some sage advice about how to detect those pesky little devils that so easily slip by our revisions. In her article entitled “How to ‘Kill Your Darlings’ and Survive the Process” posted on The Write Practice, she recommends that we invite our Beta readers, those who are the first to lay eyes on our work, to offer their objectivity in exposing these sentences, paragraphs, chapters and characters for the obstacles they have become. She also offers hope and mercy suggesting we save our darlings in a file for a future, more appropriate home. This may ease the pain of parting.

My own struggle with putting the concept of “Kill your darlings” into practice is due in part to the fact that I enjoy the challenge of the wordsmith. I enjoy bending those iron words into different shapes to make them fit. Though often times once I begin that process, the bends create so many turns that my readers may be exhausted before they get to the point. And it will have been self-defeating. I’m still learning to manage that.

It reminds me of a similar lesson I’m trying to learn. John O’Donohue, author of Anam Cara and Beauty, tells us that we can’t hammer our will into submission without doing violence to our soul. Our soul needs freedom, needs to be unhampered and yet at our core we want to live with intention. O’Donohue tells us it’s a matter of finding rhythm.

There’s a natural flow to our inner lives if we can learn to sense it. This patience and trust in learning our own soul mirrors the patience and trust needed to let a story tell itself without being manhandled. Surrender is key.

We need skills, of course. And yet it’s the development of the writer that we find once again at the forefront.

When was the last time you experienced a story telling itself, either your own or someone else’s?

Writing Prompt For the Week: Unhampered