I will Kill my Darlings ...

“Kill your darlings” is an oft-repeated piece of advice for writers. The weird thing is that there is little agreement on what it means. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that all of them are true. Delete that word, sentence, your favorite scene, chapter, or prologue. Kill your best, mostest favorite character that takes after you, the author. Everything, all of them—nothing should be safe.

To prepare for re-plotting EXTINCTION SPECIES, I entered the complete manuscript into Plottr. I then summarized each chapter on a small piece of a Post-it note.

In the image below, you can see the strips of Post-it notes near the bottom of the printout. It is summarized up to the big battle. The big battle and the ending are not done yet. The big battle is nine (9) chapters long. Nine, yes 9. Jesus.

It is so obvious to me now that entire chapters must be deleted—as was often stated by my editor.

I have always said that one of my strengths as a writer was editing. I thought I was ruthless. Turns out I’m not ruthless enough. At one point, before sending it off to editors, I cut the original manuscript down from 100K to just over 92K. Beta readers would say, “Oh no, you’re cutting good stuff out!” “No, no, I’m not”, I would reply.

Now I realize that not just whole chapters, but many scenes with my favorite moments will have to be cut. As I am thinking about changing the POV (point of view), other favorite scenes would be a problem to include in the revised text.

Why am I doing this? Because I can see (again) what the manuscript will become, I can see it on a shelf in a bookstore. Something that had seemed beyond reach for months after the developmental edit.

It’s exciting to have made this decision. It feels good to have a lot of work ahead of me. I can handle a lot of work. I did twelve full self-edits of the first crack at this manuscript—a couple more after a full rewrite is something I look forward to.

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