Murdering Darlings, Murdering Characters

Last time, I talked about murdering your darlings – those pretty bits of prose, those long gorgeous descriptions, the flowering conversations that you adore, but don’t actually serve your story.

But this past week, I had to take that adage a step further. I didn’t murder paragraphs, or sentences, or entire chapters. No, I murdered an entire character.

Honestly? I should have done it sooner. If you’d have been there . . . you would have done the same.* 😉

When I started this little romance novel last fall, I had this idea in my head that Alex had been married, and his wife had left him shortly after the wedding. That evolved into leaving him on their honeymoon. Left the rings on the bedside table, took the airplane tickets, and left him in a hotel room in Jamaica. Which left him a wreck.

But somewhere along the way, that evolved into something more. At some point, I thought that after some time apart, maybe Madison (Alex’s ex) wants him back. Maybe she never stopped loving him, really. Maybe she was just afraid. Maybe they’d gotten married too quickly; maybe she felt like she couldn’t put the brakes on it, but afterwards . . . she was terrified of being trapped in a marriage she wasn’t sure she wanted anymore. Did she and Alex really know each other well enough? Did they start to grow apart while she was planning their wedding? Did they really want the same things? She couldn’t bear to hurt him by calling things off – but she couldn’t bear to be married to him when she had all these doubts, either.

The problem with this scenario was twofold. One, I had trouble believing, even to myself, that Alex would be so devastated over this that he would basically spiral into a depression. Two, this didn’t jive with what Alex kept saying about her. She was a nurse. Sweet, caring. Open-hearted. He adored her. How could he fall in love with someone who would do that? Yes, people fall in love for weird reasons all the time, but this . . . this made no sense to me. Deep down, I knew it wasn’t right.

But I couldn’t seem to let it go.

I wrote her into the novel. I based Alex and Dana’s breakup on Madison’s return. I had her coming back to Alex’s home town, ready to fight for him. She was snide, bitchy. Again, the little voices in my head kept saying but Alex wouldn’t fall for someone like this! I ignored the little voices, because I was in too deep to listen to them. I wrote Act 3. Wrote the final break-up scene where Alex tells her goodbye for good, then goes after Dana. I liked that scene. Liked it a lot. It completed his story arc.

But it left Madison as a flat, one-dimensional caricature, which was always the problem with her. And that just didn’t fit with what I knew, deep down, she was like. She’d lived through the worst of the pandemic, saw her patients die, feared for her own life. Was this a woman who would leave a man she loved? Having seen so much of death, could she really throw away their future life together?

I rewrote the ending. Made her less bitchy and selfish. Made her someone that Alex could have fallen in love with. Which left me with another problem (and I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now): if Alex loved her, and she was this lovely person, why wouldn’t he want her back?

It also left me with another problem: Dana.

The ending was rewritten. Alex broke up with Madison, went to Dana to make the Grand Gesture. And instead of saying, “Of course I forgive you, you idiot,” she said, “Are you freaking kidding me?!”

So I paused. Waited for her to do what I wanted her to do in order to have a happily ever after. She refused. And after a few days, I understood why. How could she ever trust that Alex really wanted her? How would she ever know for sure that she was his first choice? Could she ever believe that, if Madison wanted him back again, he would stay with her? He’d broken her trust. She couldn’t forgive him for that, or forget it. That was a hells to the no.

I wrote more of Madison into the book. Wrote her text messages to Alex, explaining why she left, telling him she loved him. Those told me a lot about her, and her state of mind at the time. Still didn’t solve any of my problems. I had dozens of pages that tried to make her into a.) someone Alex would actually want to be with, and b.) someone he could look in the eye and say “I’m over you and I’m in love with someone else.” I even rewrote what was the midpoint to be a tipping place near the end of Act 2, where Madison came back and saw Alex and Dana together, and Alex was now forced to choose between them.

Madison started to kind of take over the book. Like kudzu.

I wondered if Alex was even still in love with her. Wrote long notes to myself, trying to sort it out. Notes that went like this:

Someone, at some point, has to ask Alex if he still loves Madison.

He’s hurt. Angry. Betrayed. But is he still in love? Everything he tells me says no. Everything I feel from him says no. Everything I feel from him says he’s 100% committed to making Dana stay . . . except that he’s afraid she won’t. Which leaves us with the question, still:  is Alex still in love with Madison? If she came back to him, begged him to take her back, would he? Is he still in love with the idea of that future? Is he still in love with her?

In the meantime . . . deep, deep down . . . I was starting to form a theory I didn’t like.

I was starting to think that Madison had to die.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’d eradicated a character from a work in progress, but those characters just got written out, forgotten. This would be actually murdering a character. Not because they were superfluous or because the plot had changed . . . but because doing so would actually serve the book. Because doing so would solve 99% of my problems. Because the Madison I knew, and Alex knew, wasn’t the girl who came tramping back in Act 3 to steal him back from Dana.

So a couple of days ago . . . I did it.

And oh my goodness, I can feel that I made the right choice. Alex’s inner demons and conflicts are greater now, the threat they pose to his relationship with Dana more real. Madison can be the perfect girl in his memory, because she kind of was. And more to the point, I can get back to the way Act 3 should go in a romance novel – it’s the characters’ inner conflicts that drive them apart, not something external. Madison gets to be the funny, sweet, bubbly girl Alex fell in love with, and we know why he’s depressed as hell when we first meet him. Doing that automatically added depth and tension to the novel that it was frankly lacking. Or rather, added real depth and tension to the novel, rather than the forced stuff I was foisting onto it.

All the space that Madison had filled can now go to the actual story, to developing Alex and Dana’s relationship.

And I can tell I’ve made the right choice because the writing is so easy. It was like Alex and Madison were waiting for me to get it right. I can’t wait to write again. Rather than beating my head against the proverbial brick wall, I’m seeing exactly how scenes need rewritten, how to chart Alex and Dana’s story arcs. Even that bloody Act 3 is coming together, finally. Without Madison there to throw a monkey wrench into everything, it’s down to Alex and Dana and the question of will they be able to move past everything and get together?

It was a tough choice. But it was the right one.

So don’t be afraid to murder your darlings. Even if those darlings are characters.

* Lyrics from the amazing “Cell Block Tango” from the musical Chicago. Yes, I can quote something other than Hamilton! Haven’t seen it? Please do yourself a favor and watch one of the Miscast Broadway performances. No, actually, here you go – what I think are the two best Miscast versions of “Cell Block Tango.” Enjoy!

Murder Your Darlings. Seriously. Murder them already.

Generally speaking, murder is wrong.

But sometimes, it is necessary.

In writing, “murder your darlings” isn’t just an adage; it’s practically a commandment. It’s been attributed to Faulkner, who said “In writing, you must kill all your darlings,” but he probably got it from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who, in his 1916 book On the Art of Writing, said:

“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.”

And if you need someone more recent, and perhaps more published, to tell you this, here’s Stephen King from his book On Writing:

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

Not only can it be really hard to murder your darlings, it can be really hard to figure out what a darling is, let alone how to murder it! Do you stab a sentence? Poison a paragraph? Choke an entire chapter? Is this entire paragraph a darling to be murdered? Maybe! But I’m going to leave it, because I like it.

And that, my good people, is how you figure out what darlings need murdered!

How many times have you edited and rewritten and edited a short story or novel, or even a blog post, and eventually your eyes start to skip over certain lines or paragraphs? Every time you do, there may be a tiny voice in your head saying wait a minute! Does this really do anything? Could it be merged with that paragraph on page 74, or maybe even cut completely? And you immediately become affronted. Of course you’re not going to delete this! It’s fantastic! It’s funny/witty/evocative/sexy/suspenseful . . . you get the drift. In other words, it’s too something to cut.

This is something I’ve found myself wrestling with as I write this little romance novel I’m working on. (I’m even doing it now; I just deleted “more and more” after “wrestling.” Why? Because it wasn’t needed, that’s why!) I’ve known these characters for a long time now, but they have changed and seeing them change as I write has been fun and challenging. Some things, I admit, I’ve become enamored of. Certain lines, or jokes. Yes, descriptions. Certain plot lines, though most of those got the heave-ho before I ever really started writing.

And as I edit and revise, I find myself becoming more scrutinizing. Reading every line. Judging whether they’re necessary or not. When deciding whether to cut something or to keep it, I ask myself several questions.

1.) Does this paragraph or sentence (or chapter!) move the story forward?

2.) Does it give us information we need?

3.) Does it ask a question, or make the reader ask a question?

4.) Does it provide characterization, or enhance a character in some way?

5.) Does it increase the tension?

6.) Does it fit the story, or has the story evolved past it?

7.) Is it actually a darling? Or is it integral to the story?

8.) And maybe most important of all: Will the reader miss it?

In other words . . . am I hanging on to this bit of writing because it truly adds to the book – or because I like it?

One should never murder pretty prose just because some dead guy (and the author of like 10,000 best-selling novels) tells you to. One should never murder a character or plot point just because you like it, and that makes you think it doesn’t serve the story. It’s up to you to figure out if it fits the story or not. If your character likes to speak in long, rambling, descriptive paragraphs that bring to mind the writings of Alexander Hamilton, by all means leave them in, because that is how your character speaks. (A funny aside: while one of Washington’s aides-de-camp, Hamilton once had to write to a girl that no, Washington wouldn’t give her a pass to come through the lines to see someone. All he had to say was, “Sorry, but His Excellency will not allow it.” Instead, he spent two pages letting her down easy. Could I have murdered this darling? Sure, but wasn’t it fun to learn that?!)

Think about how many novels contain paragraphs of descriptions that set the mood and tone. Imagine The Lord of the Rings without descriptions of – well, everything. If your novel is set in a place that requires intricate descriptions, those are probably darlings you won’t murder, because they’re not really darlings. They’re an integral part of the story.

Just this week, I’ve murdered several darlings. One was just today, and it was from one of the few scenes that actually made it from the original book to this one. Dana has been invited to dinner at Alex’s family’s house, and there, sees a portrait of one of Alex’s ancestors. In the original (and up until this morning), she commented on how much Alex looks like him; Alex is taken aback, and says he’d never noticed it before. Originally, it was meant to comment on Alex’s self-consciousness and the family dynamics, but all of that had changed with this new book, and I kept cutting it down, until finally today I just looked at those few lines I had left, and thought: “Does this still serve a purpose? Will any reader ever miss that?”

The answer was no.

So it was cut.

Tonight, I cut an entire chapter. It conveyed information, but that was all it did. I moved some of the most important conversations to another scene entirely, where it could create a little more context and tension, and what was left over wasn’t important enough to keep. Voila! Chapter gone!

Last night, I rewrote the ending to another chapter that lacked tension. Actually, that meant rewriting about three pages, but in the end, the chapter is much stronger, and those things I cut and changed? No one will ever know they were there but me.

And that’s the thing I keep returning to. The one benchmark I keep in the back of my mind. Will the reader miss it? And let’s be honest: the answer is almost always going to be no, isn’t it? Unless you have some beta readers who might have seen an earlier draft, no one but you will ever know what you cut. No one but you will ever miss your murdered darlings! Isn’t that freeing? Isn’t that empowering?!

None of this is to say that you can’t write darlings that you might murder later. You should never censor yourself in those first few drafts. That’s not what ‘murder your darlings’ means. But when you’ve finished those first drafts, and you’re starting rewrites, that’s when you start.

That’s what first (and second and third and eighteenth) drafts are for. That’s when we’re exploring our world, getting to know our characters, getting everything down on paper. Even Quiller-Couch said “whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it whole-heartedly.” Write it, get it out of your system. You might end up keeping it! You might end up using it in a different book. And even if you don’t, it’s never truly gone. It’ll always be there in old drafts (that is, as long as you save your old drafts!).

This is also why Stephen King advocates that once you finish that first (or second or, ahem, twentieth) draft, you put the novel away for a good long while – at least 6 weeks – before you choose a night to print it, sit down, and read it through. As you do, you’ll become aware that “It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours . . . and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else . . . This is the way it should be, the reason you waited.

“It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings than it is to kill your own.”

So go forth. Commit murder.* You have my blessing.

* on your manuscript. Anything else is wrong and illegal. Yeah. That’s it. Wrong and illegal.