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.
Reference Frames
An appropriate choice of reference frame will make things far simpler, while a poor choice of reference frame can make the situation dramatically more complicated.
Intimacy and the Unreliable Narrator
Just as real people are inevitably tinted by biases, experiences, backgrounds, opinions, and perspectives, the notional storytellers of our writing are bound by the same tendencies.
Real Fiction
If reflecting reality were the ultimate goal of art, I should sell all my mirrors at an art auction, make a few hundred million dollars off about fifty dollars in glass and metal foil, and retire as a world-famous artist.
Progress and Revisions
I am now being deliberate about developing and implementing the rhetoric I want to see - rather than treating it like an unchanging operating system I can only affect indirectly, I am treating it like an application I can custom-code to my specifications.
Novel-ty
Studying these matters causally might be impossible, but a recent paper, “Sameness Entices, but Novelty Enchants in Fanfiction Online,” explores a correlational relationship between the enjoyment of a work and the work’s originality through a data analysis of an online fanfiction archive.
Magical Explanations
Magic stops being magical when it’s explained, but physics becomes more magical the more we understand it.
Nonlinear Storytelling
Balancing a timeline across multiple viewpoints and storylines, and deciding how the viewpoints will be sequenced and presented is all the nonlinearity most stories will necessitate or support. But there are stories where it is appropriate to do something more creative and imaginative.
Lengths and Forms
Working within those forms is part of managing reader expectations, which is a key component of making a story appeal to a given reader, but the expectations we have around form and length of stories are not derived from some optimization method synchronized with humanity’s ability to interact with literature.
Speeches as Poetry
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to give a short speech at a large event. Maybe it could have been more distinctive if I’d had this thought before the speech, instead of about two hours later: I should have treated the speech like poetry.
IGC Publishing 