I wrote briefly to you about it last week and will continue to write about it because it’s the part of writing that I have the most trouble with: the “killing” of darlings. For a while now I’ve thought that the murder metaphor was harsh by necessity; it describes the cold-blooded mentality one needs in order to cut pieces of a story for the benefit of the whole.
But there’s a finality to murder, and maybe in the time of hand- and typewritten manuscripts, the loss of words written was closer to death. I imagine Faulkner, pipe in mouth, mint julep on desk, torturing himself over a page he knows he should cut. He stands and paces. He can’t take it anymore. He picks up the page, rips it in half, then in half again, and again. Once more. He throws the scraps into the fireplace and drags on the pipe. The sentences are in memory still but the exact words, they’re gone. For good. No way of getting them back. And he feels SO MUCH BETTER.
My manuscript, on the other hand, is redundant, holographic. I have drafts saved as separate files each synced to Dropbox and as I excise larger paragraphs I paste them into a “limbo” document in case I find a place for them later and am too lazy to dig through an old file. I Command-X instead of Delete, so things stay on the clipboard, and even when I do delete something it’s not completely deleted, it’s still out there in some virtual trash can, some server backup image, recoverable in a few clicks; it still lives a life in the world. Or to put it another way: it’s less like murder and more like a breakup.
The first act of the novel is too long. I remove a paragraph that has been there from the beginning. That has been part of the book for over THREE YEARS. I don’t think I’ll miss it much at first but no, wait, there are words later on that depend on those first words. I have built part of my life around those words and now, suddenly there is a void, a void that I have created. The book feels less complete without the old words. I beg them back.
