We are all drowning, and we are all saviors.
Wresting with addiction, guilt, and self-loathing, gifted
photojournalist Skade Felsdottir finds herself trapped in a web of her own
creation when she is forced by circumstances to return to her hometown—the
place that holds her crippling secrets. After screwing up her “big break”, a
photo essay book about descansos—roadside memorials to people who have died
tragically, Skade tries to salvage the project against a tight deadline. While
simultaneously working and keeping her darkest demons at bay, Skade reconnects
with an old boyfriend and befriends a unique but broken young woman named Kit.
Their burgeoning friendship begins a process of healing for them both, until a
devastating sequence of events plunges Skade into darkness, leaving her to
decide between redemption and running away; between life and death. Set against
a backdrop of the back roads of a forgotten America, American Still Life
explores the crossroads of grief and artistic expression, of loneliness and
atonement. A journey familiar.
Kill Your Darlings
There is a famous bit
of writerly wisdom that invariably elicits some form of fear or recoil
(including scoffs and defensiveness, which are just fear in wolf’s clothing) in
all writers, both experienced and new: “Kill your darlings.” This advice to all
writers is often misunderstood or confused in some way, even its attribution is
cloudy; it is most often attributed to William Faulkner, but the actual quote
is “Murder your darlings” (even more bloodthirsty!) and was originally used by
the English writer Arthur Quiller-Couch in 1916 (either in a book he wrote
called On the Art of Writing, or in a lecture to Cambridge University
students, even that is unclear!). But beyond who actually said it, what does it
really mean to us writers working today, and why is it such good advice (or is
it actually good advice)?
Let me begin by saying the same thing I say to every novel
writing class I ever lead: There are no rules. As such, feel free to ignore
anything anyone has said to you about how to write. Art is art is art. The
second thing I always say, fast on the heels of that anarchy, is: There are
also a million rules, and the better you know them, the better off you’ll be.
Both of those statements are true, and they are not actually mutually
exclusive. The better you know the infrastructure of the art, the easier and better
you will be able to create something interesting and meaningful, and the more
appropriately you will be able to not follow the rules (if that makes sense).
Kill (or murder) your darlings, while it is a bit of an
over-generalization to get to a pithy turn-of-phrase, is aimed at making sure
everything you write is fully in service to your story. In every book there is
a primary story line and sometimes a few sub-story lines, which themselves need
to in someway support the primary line. It’s easy as a writer to get offline
and start writing material that strays farther and farther from pushing the
story forward. A lot of times this takes the form of what I call “Process
Writing”. Process writing is the writing we do to find our way into a scene or
a chapter. Usually, it’s either lots and lots of description (of the room, of
the weather, of a character, etc.) or it’s a huge stream of interiority telling
us what a character is thinking and remembering and feeling and wondering and
hoping and worrying and speculating, and on and on. I do both (the description
thing is my special problem) to get my mind into the mood of the scene or
trying to find that little bit of propulsive traction I need to get the scene
rolling. Process writing is like warming up or clearing your throat on the
page. Sometimes you get some amazing descriptions or thought lines that lead to
other things and soon you’re skipping down a side path away from your story. As
beautiful and meaningful as these wonderful bits of writing are, if they are
not pushing the story forward, they need to come out (killed darlings).
Another type of darling can come later, when you really start
to know your characters and they start talking to you about what they might
think or want to do. You love them and enjoy spending time with them, so you
indulge them some of these desires. You begin to create entire scenes centering
around a character, a place, or an event that you enjoy playing with and before
you know it you’ve got whole chapters, beautiful, enjoyable, that have little
or nothing to do with the story you are actually trying to tell. In both my
novels (The Arts of Legerdemain as Taught by Ghosts and American
Still Life) I reached a point where I removed entire chapters entirely from
the manuscript for this very reason (as a side note, if you can actually do
that: remove an entire scene or chapter and the story still makes perfect sense
and nothing is lost in the story flow, you did the right thing. That’s a
perfect clue you had a darling that needed murdering). For me, one of the
surest clues I’m writing something I might need to take out is when I start
getting cute with my voice, I start stretching my language to the poetic or the
extreme end of lyrical.
Rules for darling killers. First and most important… NEVER
kill anything, darling or otherwise, until late in the editing process! I
cannot stress this enough. Your job as you are generating your first (rough,
working, whatever you call it) draft is to just write, just create, it’s all
good and valuable. Never cut anything until you flip into that editorial-mode.
You don’t do that until you’ve got the end done on the first draft. Only then
are you allowed to hunt darlings. Second, NEVER throw anything away! Just
because it doesn’t belong in this story doesn’t mean its not great writing and
that you might be able to use it in another story sometime. I’m still holding
onto lines I wrote ten years ago waiting to use them in the perfect spot. And
the two chapters I edited out of the two novels both became stand-alone short
stories and were (or will be) published in lit journals (which is another clue
they were darlings. If they can stand on their own two feet, let them.) Third,
darlings can hide. They most often like to hide behind “Character development”
or “Mood creation” … watch those things. Less is more! I still go back and
forth about the chapter I removed from American Still Life. I liked it
and saw its value. My editor felt differently. I caved. Was it a darling? Yes…
Did it need killing? I’m still not sure. But the book worked.
Remember, the most important thing you are doing is telling a
story. The story’s the thing (to paraphrase Shakespeare). Get your story
across. The story always should win. And also remember, you get to keep a LOT
of darlings across a nice tight eighty-to-one hundred-thousand-word manuscript.
Good writing is good story telling. There’s a lot of ways to do that. Find
yours!
About the Author
With roots in the American deep south and the Midwest
grounding his sense of place, Jim Naremore has published an array of short
fiction and the award-winning novel The Arts of Legerdemain as Taught by
Ghosts (Belle Lutte, 2016). He holds an MFA from the Solstice program at
Lasell University in Boston and currently lives with his partner and cat in New
York’s Hudson River Valley.
You can find the author at: https://www.jim-naremore.com/
