Revising and Keeping

 I am trying to clear out the email and I ahve two articles dealing with revising one's writing. Maybe this is a cosmic message. I have had enough of my attempt at a novella to even want to look at it right now.

From The Millions, Aidan Ryan's Stet: On Cutting—but Keeping—Everything has some interesting things to say.

I’ve always struggled with revision that reduces. I’m a natural maximalist, partial to parentheticals, always tilting into tangents. More is more is more. I don’t care about a blackbird that I can look at only once.

For the speaker this can feel like flying, defying the gravity of the period. But for the listener it feels like fishing with hand grenades: a long, uncomfortable process that renders whatever it yields not worth keeping. You have to pay for your tangents, either in the currency of trust or patience. I can’t, for example, tell you about my great uncle Pat, who fished with hand grenades in German lakes during the Second World War, who died last spring, leaving me this and other images. I haven’t earned it. In my experience—in love and writing—you can earn patience with your voice, the way you say something, but you only earn trust by keeping your promises.

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In a separate document titled “Miscellaneous,” which I never close, I begin a new page, a motion like opening an empty drawer at a moratorium. I put a heading at the top, one that will bud a new jumplink in a table of contents that now spans two pages. Ctrl-V.

The room is no cooler, but I feel relief like a breeze. I’m free to try again. “Kill your darlings,” something William Faulkner supposedly said, is one of those memorable maxims that teachers of writing love to tell their young students. I’ve learned to revise around this rule. I prefer to keep my darlings on ice.

And it is a wonderful essay. Writers, go read the whole thing, please. 

Meanwhile, over at Counter Craft, there is Necromance Your Darlings Killing your darlings doesn't have to be the end... I have found much that is sensible advice through Counter Craft, so check it out. This particular essay points interesting me are:

I should probably clarify what I mean by “kill your darlings,” since like many writing clichés—from “write what you know” to “show don’t tell”—it’s often interpreted in strange ways. I’ve seen people claim it means you should always cut your favorite part of any story or poem. Or even that you should literally have your favorite characters die in your novels. While the latter isn’t bad advice, perhaps, the original meaning of “kill your darlings” was actually about cutting overly ornamental prose. The phrase is attributed to dozens of famous writers from William Faulkner to Anton Chekhov, but the earliest known attribution belongs to (the very Britishly named) Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch in his 1914 Cambridge lecture “On Style”:

[I]f you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’

So the original meaning is to cut overly flowery, writerly prose. This is also good enough advice, although also not what the phrase has come to mean. These days “kill your darlings” is used to mean that you have to be ruthless in cutting lines, characters, ideas, or anything else that doesn’t serve the story. This is the kind of principle that we can all agree with in principle yet can be hard to enact. The writing process is so full of failures and setbacks that when we manage to eek out something powerful or interesting in a session it is hard to admit to ourselves that, while it might be fantastic in isolation, if it doesn’t work in the context of the story then it needs to go. You’ve got to select that darling and drop you finger on the guillotine of the delete key.

I wonder if the idea of killing everything irrelevant to the story might not have come from the magazine, particularly the pulps. Hemingway and Hammett come to mind here.

Yet some of the material from original story—that didn’t fit into “Air”—stuck with me. I let those ideas percolate and evolve and twist and then, again years later, wrote a kind of Sam Lipstye meets Lovecraft horror story called “Dark Air” that was published in my collection Upright Beasts and also in Granta in 2015. (I promise I don’t put “Air” in all my titles.) The story grew out of the bones of my murdered darlings, but bloomed into something completely different. Whereas “Air” is a 500-word realist flash story, “Dark Air” is a 7,000-word science fiction horror tale. Still, I’d never have written the latter without killing some darlings to make the former.

Many stories for many writers work this way, in my experience. Ideas never go away. They can be resurrected whenever you need. And indeed they can be resurrected over and over, turning into a different creature each time.

Too often in writing we have the idea that ideas are singular. That we exhaust them in the a given story and must move on to the next. But in other artforms, like painting, countless variations of an idea is the norm. How many times did René Magritte paint men in bowler hats or variations on a window shattering with the image of the background? Does it matter?

I find myself with this problem of similar plot devices and characters, too often very autobiographical, that I feel are proof of my limited imagination. Reading this makes me think the solution may be different perspectives. Well, it is an idea.

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