- Invitation Status
- Looking for partners
- Posting Speed
- 1-3 posts per week
- One post per week
- Slow As Molasses
- Writing Levels
- Advanced
- Prestige
- Preferred Character Gender
- Male
- Female
Hello, I'm Nav. I'm not literary master. In fact, English isn't my first language and I've only been seriously writing for about three years. I'm not very experienced, I'm not a published novelist, and I'm certainly not someone whose word you should take as absolute truth. I'm just a casual writer who may or may not have a few small ideas here and there. I wrote this tutorial because I found myself falling victim to clinging to 'my darlings' and needed to find my own escape from over-writing my posts to death. I hope at least someone gets some use out of it. (:
Kill your darlings.
How many times have you read that before? Five? Ten? Fifty? More? The fact is, most writers have heard it or read it somewhere during their literary career. It's a cute, fun saying that's been tossed around for centuries in various writing workshops, guides, and tutorials split seconds before a new topic is covered, but whoa, whoa whoa… slow down… what does it actually mean to 'kill my darlings'? More importantly, what does killing your darlings do for your writing and how can it turn you from a good roleplayer into a great one?
The critical difference I have found, any many very famous, well renowned writers before me have found, is that the difference between 'good' and 'great' prose rests in two primary categories: actually writing your shit and actually editing your shit, but keeping those two categories separate. Writing should be writing and editing should be editing. Writing is where the passion comes in; editing is where the objectivity comes in. When married correctly, writing and editing are extremely powerful. When writing becomes editing and editing becomes writing, writers begin to develop bad habits. Primarily, they grow passionate about avoiding the editing and the objectivity in their writing wanes. It's easy to see why passion is important in writing: it's what infuses prose with emotion, it's what causes readers to want to read more, it's what gives a passage a message, but the importance of objectivity is harder for many writers to grasp. Objectivity in your writing allows you to see through the bull and into the important stuff. It allows you to remove pieces of your writing that is making the prose less effective with your reader without letting your own pride, insecurities, or preferences cloud your judgement.
Before we continue on the vein of editing, I'd like to briefly discuss the writing half of writing and editing. One of the greatest assassins of good writing is not bad writing, but the word 'aspiring.' As a writer, you can only be doing one of two things: writing or not writing. Face it, if you call yourself an 'aspiring writer' it means you're not writing. It means you're not writing good material, it means you're not writing bad material and truthfully, bad material is better than no material. Before we begin steeping deeper into our topic of the day, killing your darlings, I want you to scratch the word aspiring from your vocabulary temporarily.
You are a writer, damnit. Aspiring writers wait for their writing to improve by means of magic, divine intervention, or luck. Writers take charge and take active steps towards honing their skills.
So, writer, let us turn our focus back to the original purpose of this post: you must kill your darlings. The quote 'you must kill your darlings' is often misunderstood advice from the hand of William Faulkner, whose quote "In writing, you must kill all your darlings" has been contested, warped, and regurgitated over time, but whether Faulkner meant by his words what we are going to explore today, it doesn't matter.
Kiling your darlings is not necessarily about killing a character. Instead, killing your darlings is about removing passages, characters, or parts of a piece of prose that you don't need. Usually, these parts are the parts the writers loves the most. Many people are often mistaken in thinking that their favorite chunk of their writing is their best chunk of writing. They're probably wrong, and here's why. Often, the sections of prose that a writer most thoroughly enjoys was written for the writer's pleasure, not the reader's. Affection clouds judgement and objectivity on a piece, so a writer's favorite passage is often proofread with less intensity than other passages. The goal of this tutorial is to practice objectivity about our writing and improve our ability to edit ourselves, so let's aim our turrets first at the most common darlings that crop up:
Any section of prose a writer writes and loves probably isn't half as good as he or she believes. While this might not always be the case, we are going to assess quickly several reasons why a writer might be hesitant to cut a piece of prose they feel is their best, but why they should do it anyways.
So, with all of that out of the way, we can get into the thick of solving our dilemma: how can we kill our babies? Our darlings? Our prides and joys? There is an endless number of ways to accomplish this and you're going to have to experiment until you find what is best for you. Here are a few starter tricks to help avoid the over-indulgence:
At the end of the day, novice writers often try to compensate for a lack of confidence in either their reader or themselves (or both) by over-complicating something that shouldn't be over-complicated. Slay your doubts with the same ferocity you slay your darlings. If you really want to challenge yourself and improve your self-editing skills, I leave you with a few last tests of courage:
You are a writer. You're not a future writer, not a 'someday maybe I'll publish a novel' writer, not an aspiring writer... you are a writer right now, in this moment, and it's your job to make the best of it for both you and your reader.[/hr]
-Nav
Kill your darlings.
How many times have you read that before? Five? Ten? Fifty? More? The fact is, most writers have heard it or read it somewhere during their literary career. It's a cute, fun saying that's been tossed around for centuries in various writing workshops, guides, and tutorials split seconds before a new topic is covered, but whoa, whoa whoa… slow down… what does it actually mean to 'kill my darlings'? More importantly, what does killing your darlings do for your writing and how can it turn you from a good roleplayer into a great one?
The critical difference I have found, any many very famous, well renowned writers before me have found, is that the difference between 'good' and 'great' prose rests in two primary categories: actually writing your shit and actually editing your shit, but keeping those two categories separate. Writing should be writing and editing should be editing. Writing is where the passion comes in; editing is where the objectivity comes in. When married correctly, writing and editing are extremely powerful. When writing becomes editing and editing becomes writing, writers begin to develop bad habits. Primarily, they grow passionate about avoiding the editing and the objectivity in their writing wanes. It's easy to see why passion is important in writing: it's what infuses prose with emotion, it's what causes readers to want to read more, it's what gives a passage a message, but the importance of objectivity is harder for many writers to grasp. Objectivity in your writing allows you to see through the bull and into the important stuff. It allows you to remove pieces of your writing that is making the prose less effective with your reader without letting your own pride, insecurities, or preferences cloud your judgement.
Before we continue on the vein of editing, I'd like to briefly discuss the writing half of writing and editing. One of the greatest assassins of good writing is not bad writing, but the word 'aspiring.' As a writer, you can only be doing one of two things: writing or not writing. Face it, if you call yourself an 'aspiring writer' it means you're not writing. It means you're not writing good material, it means you're not writing bad material and truthfully, bad material is better than no material. Before we begin steeping deeper into our topic of the day, killing your darlings, I want you to scratch the word aspiring from your vocabulary temporarily.
You are a writer, damnit. Aspiring writers wait for their writing to improve by means of magic, divine intervention, or luck. Writers take charge and take active steps towards honing their skills.
So, writer, let us turn our focus back to the original purpose of this post: you must kill your darlings. The quote 'you must kill your darlings' is often misunderstood advice from the hand of William Faulkner, whose quote "In writing, you must kill all your darlings" has been contested, warped, and regurgitated over time, but whether Faulkner meant by his words what we are going to explore today, it doesn't matter.
Kiling your darlings is not necessarily about killing a character. Instead, killing your darlings is about removing passages, characters, or parts of a piece of prose that you don't need. Usually, these parts are the parts the writers loves the most. Many people are often mistaken in thinking that their favorite chunk of their writing is their best chunk of writing. They're probably wrong, and here's why. Often, the sections of prose that a writer most thoroughly enjoys was written for the writer's pleasure, not the reader's. Affection clouds judgement and objectivity on a piece, so a writer's favorite passage is often proofread with less intensity than other passages. The goal of this tutorial is to practice objectivity about our writing and improve our ability to edit ourselves, so let's aim our turrets first at the most common darlings that crop up:
- Extraneous Plot Limbs – I call them 'plot limbs' because they're little branches out of a main plot-line that don't do anything for the main plot except hang off of it like a dead branch. These types of plot limbs often arise from world building. World building is incredibly satisfying, whether it's the backstory of a character of an entirely new universe. Creating facts, a linear history, and landscape are good to ensure consistency throughout the character and/or world, but once a world is built, the urge to include 'extra' can be incredibly overwhelming. For example, when building a planet for a sci-fi world, it can be really tempting to dump pounds of historical information on your players or readers that they don't need to know. Does the side-plot or sub-plot directly impact the story you want to tell? If not, remove it.
- Wimpy Characters – Wimpy characters are not characters that couldn't hold their own in a fist fight. No, wimpy characters can mean one of two things: they can be unbalanced characters, or characters that don't have a purpose. No one is all strengths or all flaws and that is true for characters as well. Infuse them with more than one personality trait and avoid shallow characters. This is not the tutorial for character development. If you don't know what a shallow character is, follow up with another tutorial. Next, a character without a purpose. Whether a roleplay or a novel, if a character isn't serving a purpose that feeds the main plot (and not a plot limb), they are a wimpy character. It's time for your wimpy characters to die.
- Description – For most writers who have a few years of experience, especially roleplayers, killing description is the hardest thing for them to do. Description is meant to expand and excite a reader, not drag down the pace of the plot. If description is not supplementing the 'show don't tell' mentality (another writing quote I would like to cover in another tutorial) or is not adding to a character's action or a scene development, it's time to castrate that piece of purple prose. For example, writing "Joe avoided Sally like the plague" does not add any more impact to the action than writing "Joe avoided Sally".
Any section of prose a writer writes and loves probably isn't half as good as he or she believes. While this might not always be the case, we are going to assess quickly several reasons why a writer might be hesitant to cut a piece of prose they feel is their best, but why they should do it anyways.
- Pride – It can be incredibly demoralizing and frustrating to realize a section of prose may not be as wonderful as you think it is. Often, killing your babies can lead to doubt or withering confidence, but that's not what it's meant to do. The goal isn't to cut everything you like simply because you like it. The goal is to cut things because they add no value to the piece.
- Insecurity – Writing is a huge means of putting one's self out there. Every writer has been criticized, some in nicer ways than others, and it does hurt to know someone doesn't like something you wrote. This can cause writers to want to over-do plot limbs, wimpy characters, and description just so they can feel like they're hitting every reader's interest. I'm going to only say one thing about this: hell no. You're never going to appeal to everyone, so stop trying.
- Habit - More common in the roleplaying community I think, I see a lot of writers who are simply engrossed with poor writing habits. Many roleplays often include word count minimums, or paragraph minimums. To meet this goals, writers may be tempted to vomit up purple prose just to meet requirements and get into bad habits without even realizing it because they are unsure of how to move a scene along in a group setting, or are unsure how else to fill the empty space.
- Poor (or No) Editing – Many writers will openly admit they don't like to edit their writing, so they don't. There is a vast difference to a post being acceptable and a post being 'exciting, mind-bobbling, and worthy of all the ratings.' Aim to kindly dismember any inessential piece of a post as possible, and that alone will cause a greater impact in one post than you probably would have otherwise achieved in five. Does anyone really want to read about every blade of grass for four paragraphs? Hell no!
So, with all of that out of the way, we can get into the thick of solving our dilemma: how can we kill our babies? Our darlings? Our prides and joys? There is an endless number of ways to accomplish this and you're going to have to experiment until you find what is best for you. Here are a few starter tricks to help avoid the over-indulgence:
- Show, Don't Yell – Description, metaphors, and similes should do one of two things: aid in your reader's understanding of a scene or not be in your piece. No matter how many words you write, fifty or fifty-thousand, you will never describe a scene well enough so what you picture in your head is exactly what a reader pictures in their head. Face it, your reader will vision scenes differently than you do. Embrace it. Instead of trying to bog them down with as many details of your vision as possible, provide just the essentials and allow them to create their own version. The more you try and cram a mental image in a reader's head, the more likely they are to stop reading what you've written.
- Value your Pace – A novel, or a roleplay, is more valued when a pace is set and maintained. Writers are often faced with the worry that their readers may not understand what is trying to be conveyed and will go on and add even more detail. Don't hold your reader's hand. They are your reader, not your toddler. The more you hold your reader's hand, the more likely you are to lose your reader. Readers are generally more comfortable, especially in group roleplay situations, when they know what to expect for pacing. If you suddenly begin to throw in more garbledygook to help them, you're probably just confusing and frustrating them more.
- Covet the Importance - As stated above, many writers experience self-doubt or insecurity when they first begin to cut out things they love from their writing, but that is not the point. The point is to be able to remain objective about your writing, not cut prose because you love it and someone told you that because you love it, it's bad. For every paragraph of prose you write, give a concrete, bullet-proof reason as to why it should stay. Does it move the plot along? Does it add literary value to a scene? Is it important in some way to the main plot? If you are having trouble coming up with a good reason for it being there, it probably shouldn't be there.
- Less is More – If you ever feel even the small inkling of doubt that you may be overloading the reader, trust it. You have too much and you're overloading the reader.
At the end of the day, novice writers often try to compensate for a lack of confidence in either their reader or themselves (or both) by over-complicating something that shouldn't be over-complicated. Slay your doubts with the same ferocity you slay your darlings. If you really want to challenge yourself and improve your self-editing skills, I leave you with a few last tests of courage:
- Cut out 90% of your adverbs. Adverbs are annoying little words that are seldom necessary. They share unnecessary facts that do nothing to improve a reading experience. They are words like 'quickly,' 'beautifully,' and 'randomly'—they modify verbs and you should get rid of them if the additional description is not necessary. For example, 'she walked slowly ahead' is not nearly as effective of a description as 'she ambulated ahead.'
- Murder anything without quantitative meaning. For example, 'very fast' or 'quite slow.' This is lazy description that adds nothing. To quote Tom Schulman, "Don't use 'very sad,' use 'morose.'"
- Then – The word then is often used to string together actions that probably don't need to be described. If your character is getting cereal for breakfast, it's more appropriate to say 'she made cereal for breakfast' as it is 'she got the milk then got the cereal and then made her bowl for breakfast.'
You are a writer. You're not a future writer, not a 'someday maybe I'll publish a novel' writer, not an aspiring writer... you are a writer right now, in this moment, and it's your job to make the best of it for both you and your reader.[/hr]
