On Killing Your Darlings: Fighting the Hoarding Instinct

On Killing Your Darlings: Fighting the Hoarding Instinct

I have a hard time letting go. My house is full of t-shirts I haven’t worn since high school, notes on epistemology and pre-Socratics from college, old essays on securities fraud. Stacks and stacks of popsicle stick creations, half-colored Thomas the Tank Engine print-outs, construction paper with one googly eye glued to it. I know I would be happier with a clean countertop and an organized closet. But unless I psych myself up, or trick myself, or get someone else (my husband) to throw things out when I’m not around, these things will stay in my house forever.

Revision triggers the same internal battle. I mostly enjoy revising. It’s fun working within a world that’s already formed, with characters who have taken on a life of their own, to reshape scenes into a tighter narrative. It’s rewarding to see what started out as a sketchy idea—and then became a sloppy first draft—take on a real form. But so much of revision is cutting: getting rid of a phrase, a paragraph, a scene that took days to write but is no longer serving its purpose. It’s painful to highlight those words and hit delete.

I have not mastered the art of letting go in revisions, but I do have a few techniques I use to ease the psychological burden of cutting (and I’m always looking for new ones): 

Cut everything in one go. When I finish an early stage draft, I type out THE END. I celebrate. I give myself time to gain some distance from the manuscript. Then I print out a hard copy and erase everything from my workspace* in one go, my word count dropping from 80,000 to 0.  That way, I can start draft number two from a clean slate.

(*For me, this means moving everything into an “archive” folder. The old draft is still available digitally in case something happens to the printed copy—I’m not a sadist—but it’s important that the new draft begins as a blank document.)

Starting with a blank page helps me feel less constrained by the previous draft. I am not forced to make the decision to delete over and over again—a decision that is painful each time—because it’s already all gone. My rule is that I can use whatever I want from the old, printed draft, but I have to retype it. This serves a strong disciplining function. It’s tempting to leave in place or cut and paste text that is serviceable but not quite right. Retyping a scene verbatim when it isn’t working is painful. That transition from paper to screen forces me to think about what really should come next, opening up possibilities for chronology and plot that I didn’t explore before. It also makes anything I use from the previous draft feel like a gain, instead of each deletion feeling like a loss.

Make a graveyard. For mid-draft revisions, and for later-stage drafts, I make myself a graveyard, a separate document or folder where I paste sentences and scenes that aren’t working. I’m not really deleting these, I tell myself. They’ll find a new home in the manuscript later. Some of them do, but most of the scenes never make it back out of the graveyard, and that’s fine.

Find a critique group or partner. I’ve belonged to two critique groups, one in-person and another online for thriller writers. I’ve gotten a lot out of both—community, encouragement, support—but one of the main benefits is that I get a second set of eyes on what I’ve written, readers who have not invested the same amount of time into each scene and chapter, and so do not have the same sentimental attachment to them. Deleting is much easier when you have a chorus of voices telling you it needs to happen.

At the end of a revision, I know I will have a much stronger piece. I also know that deleted words are never really written in vain. Some helped flesh out characters or setting in ways that will ripple through the rest of the manuscript. Others acted as scaffolding, holding the story up until something more solid could be put in place.

Still, others never actually served a narrative purpose, but they kept me writing and thinking about the story on days when I was having trouble coming up with ideas. I try to remind myself of all that as I begin my revisions. And I take some comfort in the fact that my old, discarded drafts will live on forever as print-outs stacked under my kids’ art creations, which I will never throw away.

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Allison Buccola is the author of Catch Her When She Falls. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and two children, and is currently working on her second novel.

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/allisonbuccola

CATCH HER WHEN SHE FALLS

In this “propulsive” (Kimberly McCreight) debut thriller, a young woman questions everything she thought she knew about the shocking murder that changed her life when she was in high school.

“Wildly suspenseful and almost gothic in tone.”—BookPage

Ten years ago, my boyfriend killed my best friend.

When Micah Wilkes was a senior in high school, her boyfriend was convicted of murdering her best friend, Emily, a star ballerina with a bright future. A decade later, Micah has finally moved on from the unforgivable betrayal and loss. Now the owner of a bustling coffee shop in her small hometown in Pennsylvania, she’s happily coupled up with another old high school friend, the two having bonded over their shared sorrow.

But when reminders of her past begin appearing at her work and home, Micah begins to doubt what she knows about Emily’s death. Questions raised on a true crime blog and in an online web sleuthing forum force her to reexamine her memories of that fateful night. She told the truth to the investigators on the case, but was there another explanation for Emily’s murder? A stranger in the woods. An obsessive former classmate. A domineering ballet instructor. Or the internet’s favorite suspect: Joshua, Emily’s outcast younger brother who hasn’t been seen since his sister’s death.

As Micah delves deeper into the case, she feels her grip on reality loosening, her behavior growing more and more secretive and unhinged. As she races to piece together the truth about that night ten years ago, Micah grapples with how things could have gone so wrong and wonders whether she, too, might be next to disappear.

BUY HERE

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