killing your darlings

‘Killing your darlings’, is not as some people think, simply to do with removing characters from a story. It also relates to sentences, paragraphs, entire chapters, and sub-plots. If you ever ponder whether you’re a lazy writer, ask yourself if you’re keeping any of the aforementioned simply because you like them, or because of the effort they took in creation.

This is my first post of 2023, and it’s been delayed for a good reason. During 2021, I announced the existence of my latest hero, Detective Sergeant Jason Knight aka Crusader. As usual, I had other stories in progress, so this new tale was fitted in, and I continued to move regularly from one story to another.

I’d written ten chapters of Crusader before it dawned on me that Jason’s new partner, Constance, was stealing the show. My vision for my main character had been clear, but as strong characters do, Constance made herself omnipresent. A lot of work had gone into those first ten chapters, so I put the story away for a few weeks and worked on other projects.

I returned to Crusader, and with the same panache that my main character might slay a violent criminal, I reread my new creation. The task was based on a simple palette. Black coffee to hand, my red pen at the ready, and a ruthless black and white approach to my task. This was to prove a test of wills between me and my characters, so there could be no grey areas … a chunk of hard-won writing went, or it stayed. Moving around can be done anytime.

What was the result?

It took two days to achieve my aim. As any half-decent writer knows, it’s not advisable to delete something that could be useful for something else. I removed three complete chapters, and large sections from a couple of others, and put them in a holding file. A single read through was enough to give me an idea for the name of the file—Constance: Crusader Part 2.

I left the revised version of Crusader to rest while I adjusted my thinking for the story.

‘Killing your darlings’ doesn’t mean destroying what you’ve created. If you take time to consider your options, and you’re not afraid of hard work, it could be looked at as ‘redeveloping your darlings’. It doesn’t sound as terminal, and it offers the opportunity of producing something new, like a Phoenix from the flames.

How have things moved on with Crusader, the original idea?

It’s been almost eighteen months since I wrote the opening lines of the story. I completed my most recent edit two days ago, and at present Crusader stands at 112k words. After a few more brutal editing sessions I’ll offer it up for beta reading, possibly in late February. I aim to publish in mid March 2023.

Thank you for taking an interest in my work, and, as always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

is for killing. I am talking here of ‘killing your darlings’ of course. It’s how we writers normally refer to reducing the cast in a story.

In either novel or short story writing, we find ourselves lavishing hours on the creation of well-rounded, believable characters, which is exactly how it should be. A novel will have the capacity to allow for a large cast, whereas a short story is best trimmed down to five or less characters.

Where the novel usually has a longer time scale, it is able to convey a larger number of characters. A short story, by its nature, is created to fit a short time frame, and there is therefore no facility for a cast of thousands. The fewer, the better is the advice in a short story.

Whatever I’m writing, I tend to create each character with a comprehensive profile, even though I may only use a little of the information if it’s a short story. In a novel, with a similar character, I might drip-feed small pieces of information throughout the story. Be it a novel or a short story, I invariably end up with more characters than I need to get the job done, so in that circumstance, I ‘kill my darlings’.

The phrase is borne of the fact that we get to know our creations so well that we are reluctant to remove them. We have grown to like them, to feel a relationship with them, but to be in a story, they must earn their place. If when editing a story, you find a character that doesn’t move the story forward; that character has to go. It’s heart-breaking, I know, but we must be realistic.

I’ve made peace with myself by having a parallel universe in my files. I have a file full of people, already invented, but not yet put to use. There is a pregnant woman in her 20’s, a retired policeman, an old war veteran, and many more. They all get along perfectly well in that file, but perhaps one day a couple of them will meet in other circumstances and things will not be so good.

What is today’s advice then?

Use as much care as always to create believable characters, but please remember, don’t shoe-horn a character into a story just because you like them. When you edit, you are looking for extra characters as well as extra punctuation, adjectives, adverbs and all the other things that should be removed. Happy hunting my murderous friends.

Thank you for reading. I’m off on my daily blog patrol now, and I’ll be back on Monday, with an ‘L’ of a word.