If you’re a writer, you’ve almost certainly heard the phrase “kill your darlings” with respect to the revision process, and you may have heard the related phrase “train your mules,” which is the inverse. Like “show, don’t tell,” but rather less ambiguous and interpretable, these writerly sayings are considered truisms in much of the writing community, embraced by critics who deploy the phrase to laud especially spare prose or to denigrate stories they consider too busy. Also like “show, don’t tell,” there is a vocal minority of authors who say it’s terrible advice.
The premise is reasonable, at least initially. To kill your darlings means, during the revision process, to take a hard look at the parts of the story you’re particularly passionate about, but which may not serve the overall plot/character/story, and cut them. The internet is littered with advice to authors about how to make this process less painful, like saving your darling passages in a separate document so that you can pretend you will one day come back to them, or that at least you’re not throwing away your work. This is not to say that every passage you’re passionate about will be a darling in need of killing – hopefully, many of them are intimately wedded to your story – but it is a common enough occurrence over the course of a novel to have a scene or three which you love, but which are not advancing the story in a substantial way. Remember, the “goal,” if you will, is for everything you put in your book to serve at least two purposes, so if a scene is only serving a single purpose, it should probably be trimmed and its purpose reallocated elsewhere.
In the current draft of Impressions, there is a sequence after Raven departs Hingintslurg in which he spends a lot of time learning to be a navigator for a ship, and trying to solve the longitude problem. I even read a book specifically to help me write that sequence. Several of my initial readers complained the scene felt like a detour without much payoff, mostly because Raven doesn’t actually solve the longitude problem, and the work he does towards a solution never comes back in the story in any significant way. It is a fine example of what most people would agree is a darling in need of killing to streamline and concentrate the story. If Impressions were a more standard fantasy novel, I might even agree; however, Impressions is not intended as a standard fantasy novel, and this is where killing your darlings becomes questionable.
How much does the author’s intention matter compared to the reader’s perception in determining which darlings need to die? In my head, that sequence in which Raven attempts to solve the longitude problem serves multiple purposes, just like it’s “supposed” to: it shows Raven as a polymath, which helps to justify his later accomplishments in various disciplines; it exhibits the underlying tension between the “wisdom of the ancients” and the “learning of the moderns,” which forms a continuing theme throughout the book; it very nature as a seeming dead-end enhances the book’s intended feel as a kind of novelistic memoir of Raven’s adventures, and emphasizes how lost Raven is at this point in the story. His inability to solve the longitude problem is, in that last sense, a metaphor for his mental condition after fleeing Higintslurg, and the fact that he never solves it reflects both that he never quite puts his expulsion and exile behind him, and that he can be successful and have a story without doing so – after all, he didn’t need to solve the longitude problem to help with navigation.
With all this thought behind it, is it still a darling that needs to die? Maybe. My small pool of readers failed to perceive more than a tiny sliver of those intentions, which suggests at the very least the sequence requires revision. Whether I should trim it entirely depends, I think, on my goals for the story as a whole. If I wanted Impressions to follow a more expected plot structure, it probably should be removed, and its intended effects rolled into other sequences and scenes. Except I don’t necessarily want Impressions to follow an expected plot structure, although it is vaguely in three-act format. Part of the intended effect of the story is a feeling of wandering down detours, of being lost, of following a life without plot-bumpers put up to keep it careening mostly down the “proper” lane. It might be more publishable if I cut out sequences like the longitude one, but would it actually be a better story? I don’t necessarily think so, though I’m still thinking about it.
You can see where killing your darlings is not so straightforward as it seems on the surface. They wouldn’t be darlings if they were easy to cut, but some cases are more black-and-white than others. Training your mules, the inverse case, is less well known a phrase, and probably better advice. It refers to working to improve the stubborn, difficult passages in your story which you don’t quite like, which aren’t quite working, to get them into a load-bearing, valuable form. Unlike killing your darlings, it’s almost always worthwhile to training your mules.
There are exceptions to every rule, but the “kill your darlings” rule seems especially problematic the more experience I gain with writing. Most of the time, you wrote those scenes for a reason, and if you’re excising what you’re passionate about in a story, there’s a decent chance you’re cutting something a reader would be passionate about, too. Being concise, revising and trimming, harnessing your rhetoric, is all valuable, but in killing your darlings, you may risk cutting something valuable from your story.
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