Killing Your Non-Darlings in Revision
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Episode Transcript
Hey, listeners of The First Draft Club.
And hey, if you're watching on YouTube.
Today, we are talking about killing our darlings, or rather our non-darlings: how we navigate the fear of replacing something in our draft while we're revising, whether or not it's working.
I'm currently revising a novel. It's my first pass at revision of this novel. And I'm remembering a lot about revision that I forget between books.
Like the feeling I want to talk about in this episode today, which is the reluctance to change what's there, even if I can tell it's not working. Where does that come from, that feeling? How do I understand that so I can navigate it? So that's what we're going to talk about today.
Like many writing adages, I have never loved the phrase "kill your darlings." There are so many of these. Like "show, don't tell." Don't like it. "Write every day," don't like it.
Anyway, "kill your darlings" is one of them that I don't like. Because, to be honest, I've never had darlings. I don't know if I'm just not confident enough in my writing, you know, to be wedded to a particular phrase or passage. But I've never had, from, you know, when I was a teenager and was writing creatively, I've never had this sense that something I have written is precious, ever.
I can't remember a single time. And that's not to say I don't think it's good. I can think my writing is good or clever or funny, you know, or even certain passages that they're great, but I don't default to seeing them as uncuttable, in other words.
And that's what I want to talk about today. Because my current revision process, this experience I'm going through right now, it's reintroducing me to a paradox that I'm struggling with, which is that I don't find my work uncuttable.
I can see that the story is not working, and yet I will find myself a little squeamish about reworking it, as if I'm going to break the book, even though the book isn't working right.
It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. And that is why it's really interesting to me, this feeling of, "I don't want to mess it up," when I know it's not working well enough. It's working maybe 70 or 80%, and I need it to be working 100%.
Speaking of which, plug for my other episode, I'll link to it in the show notes, on how an 80% good book will be rejected 100% of the time. Again, we'll link to that in the show notes.
Point being, there isn't a question in my mind that 80% working isn't enough for it to be working. 80% is not enough. And so why on earth are my hands hovering over the keyboard Because I'm afraid to mess with this not working draft.
Well, I have been doing some thinking about this to understand it, and here is where I have landed.
So one way of thinking about it is, it's the bird in the hand phenomenon. Okay? You know, "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," that idea.
It's the same reason why in my 20s, here we go, dating metaphor. I love the dating comparisons to writing in my 20s. It's like, I would realize a relationship isn't working. I'm sure many of you have been there. But I would also have this kind of nagging thought, like, "But what if this is as good as it gets? What if I don't find someone else and then I'm just alone? Isn't that worse?"
You know, it's kind of like that. Now, if the person were a total jackass, you know, I probably wouldn't have been dating him in the first place. So usually he was a decent guy who I had a good time with, was at least relatively attracted to. And these things would make it harder to walk away. I share that because similarly, if a draft purely sucked, if it was like 0%, 5% good, I imagine it would be pretty easy to scrap it because that's embarrassing.
But 80% good is still pretty good, right? It's not terrible. There's some good parts in there. I kind of even enjoy parts of it. It's just not great yet. And that makes it harder to walk away from, because of a phenomenon that actually has a name: "loss aversion," which you may have heard before. Loss aversion is a cognitive bias that causes us to focus on what we might lose more than on what we might gain.
And so this can lead us to make choices that are not in our best interest because we're more focused on the thing we're losing than on the thing we could gain if we let go of this thing that we already have.
I share that, that term and that concept because I think it's helpful to be aware of, to keep in mind, to be conscious of, because by bringing consciousness to it, I think it has less power over our actions and our decisions.
Now there is a kind of a second reason why I think this fear exists, even for a writer like me, you know, who wouldn't call her writing "darling." What I am solving for during revision, particularly in the first passive revision, are story problems, macro-level stuff.
Is the story working? Do I care about the characters? Do I want to keep turning the pages? Those kinds of questions. Why is this scene even here? Does it need to be here?
I am not revising on the level of the line yet, in the sense of caring about if the sentence is a good sentence, because it doesn't make sense to work on the sentences when I don't even know if that scene is going to be in the book. That is like decorating a room that you're about to tear down. This is why I teach a kind of pyramid method of revision in The Book Incubator, by the way.
But the writing itself might be working in the sense that, you know, I like the sentences. I think they're funny or descriptive and interesting and pleasant to read.
The sentences and other words are pleasurable and so it can feel weird to get rid of them when they haven't done anything wrong.
It's like punishing the whole class when they're just a couple of clowns acting out. And yet the writing is all we have in the book, right? The book is the writing. And so to solve story problems, we have to do it with the writing. That is our only material.
If a scene doesn't belong in the story, a great or charming or even gorgeous sentence doesn't get to stay there just because it stands alone and is pretty. The scene decides whether it stays there or not. And this creates cognitive dissonance, I think.
So we have loss aversion, but this is a second related reason why it can just be psychologically hard to revise effectively. Because we're solving story problems by cutting good writing.
So here's what I advise: remind yourself that you can do it again. You can write good sentences again. If you did it before, you can do it once more.
I didn't try to make a rhyming sentence there. It just happened. I'm delighted that it does.
With rare exceptions we don't become worse at writing sentences. You will be able to produce good sentences again.
Reminding myself of this at least helps to combat this oppressive feeling of loss aversion, also work on cultivating a trust of your present and future self as much as you know your past self. You want to trust your present self to make calls on the story now, and you want your to trust your future self to make the writing as good as it was in what will soon be your old draft, because you're revising.
Okay, short and sweet episode today. I hope this was helpful and I'll see you next time.
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