Murdering ones darlings ...

[Tim James]

I have spent the morning editing part of my WIP.
I have just removed a section of about 9,000 words of fairly good prose (well, good for me). Why? Well because the scene added nothing to the story. On re-reading through I realised that, lovely though it was, it had to go. It didn't develop the plot or the characters. It didn't add any mystery or drama and without it the story still holds firm.
But that doesn't mean I'm not sorry to see it go. I enjoyed writing it a lot, and maybe that is the problem and why I haven't removed it up until now. I just got so attached to it that I wanted it in the story, even though it didn't really fit.
Sad but necessary. (sniff)

 

[Carol Rose]

I lost count a LONG time ago of all the words I've deleted in manuscripts because the scene or the entire plot line simply wasn't working.

Tip: save those scenes, plot lines, characters, etc. in a separate file. You might be able to rework and use in another story one day.

Another tip: Do an analysis of each scene to keep things on track. I use an Excel spreadsheet for this.

Example: The women's fiction novel I'm writing will be over 110K - the longest book I've ever written - and it spans decades in the life of the POV character. I've plotted out the word count spent in each scene, how much time passed (in months or years) between that scene and the prior one, how much word count was spent in each year of her life, and how many months or years I covered in each 10K. This has helped me see where the book might be dragging, and where I can condense information and scenes, or cut some scenes entirely during those periods. I'm a visual person, so seeing this information on a spreadsheet helps me realize what needs to go.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

DO ITTT, the story will be stronger, and like Carol says, the work's not wasted. You did the writing, and that's all grist to the mill. I maintain a 'dump file'.

 

[Tim James]

Thanks Ladies, that's useful encouragement.
I always keep what I cut out anyway, you never know if you can rework it into something else.
I only had to make a very few minor changes to the rest of the MS to "repair the hole", so I suppose that proves it was unnecessary.

Example: The women's fiction novel I'm writing will be over 110K - the longest book I've ever written - and it spans decades in the life of the POV character. I've plotted out the word count spent in each scene, how much time passed (in months or years) between that scene and the prior one, how much word count was spent in each year of her life, and how many months or years I covered in each 10K. This has helped me see where the book might be dragging, and where I can condense information and scenes, or cut some scenes entirely during those periods. I'm a visual person, so seeing this information on a spreadsheet helps me realize what needs to go.

Wow! I thought I was organised just keeping a chapter/scene/page index, but you have really gone to town on that. I agree that it helps with seeing the overall shape of the story.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

I scrapped 150 k once, one project alone.

 

[Carol Rose]

Wow! I thought I was organised just keeping a chapter/scene/page index, but you have really gone to town on that. I agree that it helps with seeing the overall shape of the story.

Absolutely essential with this one. I jump from present day, to where the hero and heroine are celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary, to her past beginning in fifth grade. That goes back and forth for a while as the past progresses in a linear fashion, and then I drop the present day scenes to show the progression of their relationship and the story itself. I felt like I was too bogged down in insignificant detail during the high school years, so I went back through the 70K or so I had at that point and did the Excel sheet. What an eye opener. But it will be a tighter story because of it.

 

[Tim James]

I scrapped 150 k once, one project alone.

Ouch! That must have hurt.

 

[Tim James]

... I jump from present day, to where the hero and heroine are celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary, to her past beginning in fifth grade. That goes back and forth for a while as the past progresses in a linear fashion, and then I drop the present day scenes to show the progression of their relationship and the story itself. ...

I wrote a story with time jumps like that. Two-thirds of the book in the middle was effectively one huge flashback to what had happened a couple of years before the start, and there were other jumps too. It was difficult to keep track of when I was writing it, but in the end it sort of worked.

 

[Kitty]

I like using spreadsheets too, especially as I’m currently writing in the thriller genre and need to keep tabs on who knows what when and where everyone is in the timeline

 

[Katie-Ellen]

When is a poem ever truly finished for the writer? A story? Never. A published piece is a fly in amber.

 

[Charles Ott]

Yeah, I just dumped five chapters. For me, at least, writing necessarily requires a certain amount of that kind of pain. I wish I could say my revised plot is better, but I'm not sure it really is. I just know I had to start over.

 

[ChrisLewando]

I would just say to avoid the cliché!
Editing is not so much murdering one's darlings (such a hackneyed phrase) as cutting out the cancer to leave good flesh room to grow.

 

[Tim James]

I feel perhaps you misunderstood me, Chris.
I am not at all adverse to "cutting out the cancer" removing "dead wood" or other clichés associated with editing. If something is bad or detracting from the story, it's gone. No problem. I'll happily cut words, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, whole chapters if they are not good writing.
But this section was good writing (my personal view, you understand), it flowed well. It had good dialogue. It was interesting. I liked it a lot as a piece of writing and had spent a long time getting it sounding right. Its only crime was that in the final analysis it added nothing to the story, and for that reason alone I reluctantly had to cut it.
So for me, "hackneyed phrase" or not, this time I really was murdering a darling. And it hurt!

 

[Tim James]

Yeah, I just dumped five chapters. For me, at least, writing necessarily requires a certain amount of that kind of pain. I wish I could say my revised plot is better, but I'm not sure it really is. I just know I had to start over.

I know that pain too and sympathise with you. To push it to the side when you know it's not going anywhere or your plot has just unravelled before your eyes can be tough.

 

[Carol Rose]

I never thought I'd condone plotting, but I have to admit I've changed my mind recently. I'm still not at the outline stage, and I don't believe I ever will be, but I've learned the hard way the benefits of in-depth character sketches as well as having at least a basic idea of where the story will go and at what pace, what time frame, etc.

GMC - goal, motivation, and conflict - are great for keeping you on track, but I've found it's necessary to dig a bit deeper before sitting down to write. I suppose that's because this is the first non-romance I've written. Romances are formulaic. Not saying that to demean them. I've written well over 100 of them and have 95 published ones out there. But they are formulaic in that we all know how they will end. It's the middle that's the challenge.

But this is different for me. This isn't a romance, per se. I had to plot and plan and do the spreadsheet I mention above, in order to help me see the big picture. I think the more you can stand to do this at the outset, even if the story takes a different turn as you write, the easier it will be to avoid having to cut large chunks out because it's not working, or because you've written yourself into a corner.

I used to believe doing all this planning at the outset would ruin the creating flow, but it really doesn't. If anything, it helps it, at least for me, because instead of blindly writing and hoping the words take me somewhere, now I have a purpose in mind for each scene.

 

[Tim James]

For me working out the plot in detail usually comes after I have written enough to feel the "idea" as legs, or more often when the initial "hot" phase of writing is starting to cool down and I start to think "OK, it's a good idea but where is it going?"
I very rarely know what the ending will be before I start writing the beginning. And also, returning to the theme of this thread, most of what I first write gets cut in order to find the real "beginning" that usually lurks, sometimes several pages, after the start of my initial outpouring.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Cutting out what appear to be extraneous sections requires ruthlessness, which I'm happy to have. Some of the deletions are not so much darlings, but rather irksome stowaways that somehow crept on-board and which are better jettisoned into the swirling ocean of my imagination.

I made a beginner's mistake with my first Cornish Detective novel, for I was ignorant of the advised word count guidelines for genre writing, especially for a debut author. I happily churned out 140,000 words, almost double the recommended length, then I decided that my story deserved a postscript, which added 40,000 words! Once I realised my over-enthusiasm was a mistake, I spent five solid months cutting it back. I was shocked that most of the words I removed were repetitions and state-of-being verbs, the passive voice; pruning those lowered the word count by 39,000 words.

I think that there's a difference between keeping things tight in a standalone novel and one that's part of a series, in which characters have story arcs that carry over from one book to another. An excellent example of this, is Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander detective novels, when I sometimes wondered why the author was describing what appeared to be unnecessary information, as his protagonist ruminated on incidents trying to interpret them. All was sadly revealed in the final story, when Wallander realises that his confusion and memory lapses are caused by the onset of Alzheimer's disease.

 

[Robinne Weiss]

Yes, I've removed a lot of beautiful writing that didn't advance the story. It hurts only for a moment, until you re-read the story and realise how much stronger it is without it. And as others have said, you might be able to use the excised bits for something else. I have a folder alongside every novel labeled Excised Bits. I regularly go back to them for nuggets for book two of a series, or for a short story to help drum up excitement for the novel, etc.

 

[Amber]

Yeah. Makes sense. I sometimes enjoy deleting too much.

Last week I took a section and saved it in another file -- if I really need it or want it ....