When is it okay to murder our darlings?

Murder your darlings. If you have any writing background or any interest in writing, you’ve probably read the phrase. It’s attributed to a lot of authors, including Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Stephen King, and the British writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who wrote about the phrase in his book  On the Art of Writing (1916). I didn’t just pull this stuff out of my head, by the way. My brain is more of a sieve than a sponge these days.

I’d never heard of that hyphenated guy until a few minutes ago. I googled the phrase. His name popped up, along with many others. Maybe one day I’ll write a post on how the internet has not only made it easier for us to research, but has also made it easier for us to forget things. One reason I don’t hold on to many facts any more is because I don’t have to. Everything I want to know is just a couple of clicks away.  That doesn’t sit well with me, and yet I google rather than recall.

   

Isn’t it a great saying? Murder your darlings. Love it. It’s not about taking an automatic weapon to your Hansels and your Gretels, your grannies and marathoners. It means cutting out all the extraneous verbiage that breaks down the relationship between reader and text. Almost always, it’s stuff that you are in love with, which is usually one of the main clues that it needs to go. Like replacing the phrase “extraneous verbiage” with something that better fits the mood and tone of this paragraph and doesn’t make me sound like such an idiot. 

Here’s Quiller-Couch’s quote, so you can see for yourself: “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.”

The phrase has been going through my head the last few days. I’m wondering if one of the reasons has to do, not so much with editing out and rewriting words that I’m in love with, as with editing out and rewriting parts of my history. This blogging is getting dangerous. I thought the process would help unclog my words and make it easier for me to write in my authentic voice. But what I’m finding more and more is that my authentic voice isn’t just about words on paper. It’s about writing my own story.

See, when I think “murder my darlings” I’m not thinking overblown phrases, I’m thinking how telling my story could destroy the spirits of certain loved ones. 

Yesterday’s entry was not what I had originally intended to write.  I started yesterday by writing about sociopaths. I got into uncomfortable territory really fast. Uncomfortable in that I was chomping at the bit to share my story, but was afraid to because of how it would affect others. I don’t care about how my story reflects upon me. I really don’t. I’m an underdog and proud of it. I overcame. I lived to tell the tale. But the problem is, how do I tell the tale without invading the privacy of beloved others? 

Maybe I don’t tell it? Maybe I tell it another way?

I read somewhere that that’s what Anne Rice did in Interview with the Vampire. She wrote the book while she was still grieving the death of her young daughter. Supposedly, the young vampire girl that Lestat adopts was meant to represent Rice’s daughter. I've read that the Train song Calling on Angels is actually about the death of the lead singer's mother.

Yesterday’s original post, since deleted, was on gaslighting, which is one of the sociopath’s favorite weapons.  The term comes from Gas Light, a 1944 movie starring Ingrid Bergman. Bergman plays a woman who is gradually driven to near insanity by her spouse. Gaslighting means to mess with someone’s reality to the point where they start questioning their own sanity. It’s the pedophile priest who tells the abused altar boy that he brought this on himself. It’s the cheating husband who tells the suspicious wife that she’s got to stop letting her imagination run wild.  

Gas Light -- watch it and learn

I know gaslighting. I want to write about it in my story. No. It’s not want. It’s need. I need to write about it.  The challenge now becomes walking that tightrope between revealing and holding tight. I need to figure out how to write about it without murdering my darlings.