![]() Because it is one thing to get a little blood on one’s hands by smothering single descriptions, or sections of flashback, and quite another to drive crowds towards a precipice. More problematic is the question of what to do with the family of darlings known as the short story, the population known as a novel. Quiller-Couch was talking about issues of style, which he gamely admitted to being a matter of individual taste, ‘literature being personal, and men various’, acknowledging that each ‘of us constructs his sentence differently’ . Both giving and taking life offer a simultaneous sense of release and control both are the action of gods.īut to murder a six-hundred-word description of a clock is only a small killing. One may even find the same satisfaction in taking a life as one found in its creation. With this knowledge, murder becomes a mercy-killing, something to be celebrated rather than mourned. Only after one has meticulously described the walnut case of the clock, the precise gleam of the brass, the font of the numerals on the clock face, the timbre of its tick, its chime, can one accept that this detailed description wasn’t necessary at all. Murder your darlings.įor me, the crucial part of this is not the exhortation to bloodshed, but the granting of permission. In that context Quiller-Couch offered a crucial qualification: 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. The thought of changing this remarkable description makes you feel not just ill, but angry.įaulkner’s advice had its origins in a lecture given by the English writer Arthur Quiller-Couch at Cambridge University in January 1914. While they were laughing and kissing and drinking warm gin and tonic from cans you were investing time, effort and maybe pain in your six-hundred-word description of the old brass carriage clock on the mantelpiece of your hero’s childhood home, a clock that in your mind resembles the clock on the middle shelf of the bungalow you grew up in, a clock you never dared touch. You sat inside on a beautiful day while everyone else was strolling and reclining with their picnics and summer songs under a sky that was bottomless, benevolent, possibly empyrean. That these words should seem in any way beloved is because they are yours, you made them . Yet the much-quoted adage, often ascribed to William Faulkner, that writers need to ‘kill their darlings’ captures what is most difficult about editing one’s own work, namely the sense of investment and emotional connection to marks on a page, or pixels on a screen you really need to clean. Finding the right words requires trial and error, reflection, patience, it stimulates (and maddens), but it’s a process from which you cannot help but learn. Or it may reflect the fact that for any serious writer the editing process is a fundamental part of writing. This may, perhaps, tell us something about the way that fantasies, once achieved, may become intolerable. The tower falls peasants cheer the robot describes its demise. But as soon as I picture the chrome entity producing a constant stream of unimpeachable prose (and for some reason the robot is in a high stone tower) I imagine a horde of pitchfork-wielding peasantry enraged by a gift they see as unnatural. ![]() Getting it right first time is what we try to do. It is probably every writer’s dream to be able to transcribe thoughts and feelings into language that expresses them so accurately one is able to forget the gap. If this fantastical proposition inspires contradictory feelings in you, you are not alone. They will never vacillate over whether the sky should be described as blue or azure or a cerulean expanse, or not described at all. That hypothetical author (most likely, a robot) may write very quickly, or very slowly, but though they may pause they will never have to retrace their steps to question the choice of a word or its placement. One day there may be a writer who can produce flawless sentences that will only be compromised by revision. ![]()
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