Here is a post by my friend Josh. It might be a bit shameless to reblog it because he referenced me, but this is something I struggled with for quite some time. There were parts of my book (and still are more) that I needed to kill. I liked them, slaved over them, but they were like a stray note in an orchestra. They just had to be weeded out. I think this is what Hemingway was talking about when he talked about a brave and true story.
Cheers,
Bob
Twice this week, and for the first time ever, I have run across the phrase “kill your darlings”. Apparently, this is a common phrase in the writing world and I show my ignorance by not knowing it.
The first time I heard it, I was writing with my buddy Bob and trying to bend this week’s 100 word story to my will, but I couldn’t get it to work. I knew the story that I wanted to tell, but I was having trouble fitting it into the allotted word count. I asked Bob for help and told him that I needed more words to achieve the effect that I wanted.
“What about changing your first sentence?” he asked. “It’s pretty wordy.”
“But I like my first sentence,” I said.
“Kill your darlings, Josh,” he said.
In the end, I rewrote pretty much the whole thing.
And then this morning, I…
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PART-TIME NOVEL 