If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: “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. Arthur Quiller-Couch, “On the Art of Writing,” 1914
One of the problems with great writing advice is it quickly settles and hardens, losing the supple, dynamic quality that gave it power. I have in mind especially the line cited above, translated into “Kill your darlings,” passed on to countless students of writing for generations now. What does it even mean at this point?
As I’ve heard the injunction discussed, it sounds almost like there is value in ritual sacrifice. We as writers are asked by a higher power (the writing teacher? some imaginary writing establishment?) to sacrifice our offspring, and it’s like the Dylan song “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on’/ God said ‘No,’ Abe said ‘What?’/God said, ‘You can do what you want, Abe, but/The next time you see me comin’ you better run.”
Yes, a writer must be a killer, a writer must be willing to pull the trigger, but it’s about having the nerve to do it, not needing to do it. The ultimate point of the advice to me concerns not bloodletting, but distraction.
A writer must always protect her eyes. Her ability to see. This might sound self-evident, especially to the less experienced writer, but in fact, snow blindness is a hazard of the writing life. Most later career writers whose talent is on the wane are suffering from some version of this blindness, the inability to see with the yearning pained freshness of their younger selves.
It’s an exceedingly intense moral challenge to live uncluttered vision, to demand it of oneself, come what may, to insist on it and to work for it. We fall in love with versions of ourselves, and these versions of ourselves are often tied to ways of writing, tics, we don’t want to release from our clammy palms. And yet, release we must. The point of the advice is that a writer must love her characters, even and especially vile characters, but to fall over into being in love is to invite ruin, because then we are succumbing to blindness.
To fall in love is also to dip our big toe into the warm, fragrant bath of vanity, and to decide we like it. Vanity, in all its forms, is the ultimate enemy of a writer looking to forge her talent into an ever sharper instrument, to do the work of letting a story live and breathe and collapse and rise again. It’s funny, really, all the silly, vain little habits of mind, of soul, a writer lets strangle her vitality, like weed vines run amok.
One way I put it to myself is to think of people of my generation raised on sports of a certain era, who literally hear sportscaster voices in their head, saying things like “He could – go – all – the – way!” OK, I guess that’s actually Chris Berman of ESPN, doing a cheesed-over version of what I’m talking about, but the point is made. I used to hear some voice of encouragement in my head when I felt like I’d solved some big problem with a book in progress, or had what felt at the time like a monster writing day (“Hit deep to left field. … And you can tell it goodbye!”)
So silly! So pointless! So self-defeating! There is nothing to celebrate until the work is done and published and people have responded and even then, not really. So now, I’ve become a very good shot, like any good hit man. If I feel anything in this direction beginning to form into a thought, or trying to muster itself into an actual coherent thought with the whiff of visions of grandeur, I reach for the mental Uzi. Blah blah, blah! Obliterate it all! Kill those vanities! Murder them! Better yet, massacre whole villages of vanity. And then start the next writing day with the cold-eyed look of a killer who is ready to kill again. That will keep your eye fresh.
– Steve Kettmann
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