Time to Asphyxiate Your Darlings

I recently received a reply to an email of mine that said:

“Thanks for your email — a bit convoluted to read, but I think I understand what you’re asking for?”

For context, the person I was reaching out to was a bookstore owner, and the questions they’re eluding to are about their in-bookshop cat for a piece I am writing for a magazine. The opening to the email I’d sent prior to this reply, said:

“Like a neighbourhood cat sidling up to you and nutting your calves in expectation with their furry orange head (for biccies, for fuss, for the acknowledgement that your life’s purpose is successfully complete having encountered such an elegant ginger beast), I am smacking my metaphorical forehead against your bookish being in the hopes that you’d be able to answer a few questions for me.”

And reading it back… I get it.

I’m what an old boss of mine called “a fluffy writer.” My soul is made of moonbeams and fleece-lined socks, my imagination bordered with castle walls overlooking shimmering seas and forest-lined mountainscapes with gilded dragons snoozing beneath. I live inside a romanticised fantasy world of my own design; and I make that other people’s problem.

I can’t send an email without an enchanting analogy. I can’t send a message without some kind of impossible scene playing out. I can’t think in bullet points or checklists, but long-winded exposition dipped in pools of liquid moonlight. Can’t help it. I’m a fantasy writer in the real world, a mermaid in a public swimming pool, a griffin hunting for crumbs with the pigeons.

That’s not to say I am a fantastical beast; I’m just fantastically unable to keep it short. Succinct. Normal.

But I’m also a professional writer — which means I have to.

And as all writers know, we’re murderers with wrists too weak to hold our own in a prison cell, so we took the alternative route.

We became storytellers so we can legally cull a cast of individuals that we gave life to simply with the intent of breaking readers’ hearts by writing them into the grave.

But that’s not the only killing we do.

“You have to kill your darlings.”

Not actually said by an enemy of Peter Pan’s beloved Darling family, but one of the most commonly shared pieces of writing advice. It’s a helping hand from seasoned story writers, but within that hand is a scythe-shaped backspace, urging us to rid our writing of unnecessary characters, plot points, sentences, details, no matter how valuable they feel to us, the creator, in the moment.

Like a parent with a fiendish child; even if the words we write suck, we love them nonetheless. They’re our little darlings, we’ll protect them until The End.

Well, sorry but, the end for those darlings is closer than you think. If you want a story that reads naturally, flows smoothly, unfolds thrillingly — them darlings gotta go.

The thing is, for me and I’m sure for many other writers, too — I can’t do what Elsa wants me to do. A spare sentence that contributes nothing to the overall plot but includes pretty words and a reference to the moon? Yeah. I cannot let it go.

I’m not ruthless enough, not vicious, far too weak and sentimental. As you can see from my email, I’m covered in fluff. My sharp edges buried far beneath, too blunt and dull to slice away unnecessary words.

Until now.

If I want to write that fantasy romance book I’ve been working on — and I want to, I am, I will! — then I HAVE to learn. I have to dive in at the deep end, run before I can walk, close my eyes, take a breath, wrap my writerly hands around their throat and choke every unnecessary character out of them, until they wither away to pencil dust, a bloodied ink-stain left in their wake on the page.

I’m not just going to kill them, but asphyxiate them.

Delete them, destroy them, tear them to shreds so tiny I couldn’t dare piece them back together and regretfully stick them back into my writing.

With me, on the odd occasion I rein it in and remove any excessive info, it still finds a space on a spare open document, awaiting a new home like a student transitioning from first year to second. Often they end up back in the same house, the landlady (me) taking pity on their poor, underfed souls, and sticking them right back from whence they came.

I take one look at the lone sentence stripped from its family of others and shake my head at myself, a monster for breaking them up, and wriggle it back in somewhere secretively, so the inner professional within me, the logical and practical writer, cannot see. The darlings return, undeterred.

But that email was like a splash of cold ink to the eyes. It woke me up a little.

If a piece of my writing that is but a mere message requesting information about a bookshop cat cannot express its intentions clearly, then I need to take a step back, re-evaluate, and take a fluffless leaf out of the expert writer’s books who know what they’re doing. And do it.

From now on, I’m vacuuming my words — fluff be gone! I’m killing my darlings there on the spot, with no back-up doc for them to reside in. I will close my eyes, count to ten, and on three, maybe four, I’ll get rid of what needs ridding.

It’ll be a bloody mess — but it’s for the best.

Hi there cats and humans of this fine bookshop establishment. I’m writing a piece about the feline employees who roam the stacks; might I ask you a few questions about your well-read kitties?

And that’s what I’ll email them instead.