If you’ve ever agonized over deleting a sentence, paragraph or whole chapter, but know it’s what you need to, there may be relief.
Not always, not even often, but every once in a while, you can reincarnate the darling you had to kill.
In a previous post, I described how identifying the fixed points in my novel – the scenes that absolutely must happen – helped me see how one unessential chapter severely limited my story. Killing a darling scene and the whole chapter that led up to it was what I needed to do.
New plot possibilities made it easier to let go, but I haven’t actually gotten to the point of deleting the chapter from the draft. I have removed the scene card from my story deck and eliminated it from my table of contents. I let it die in my imagination; I no longer think of that scene as part of my book.
Still I have a feeling that when it’s time to open the file that holds my entire manuscript, select that whole chapter and hit “Delete,” my heart will not break, but it will creak.
Last week, I found new hope for all of us who suffer from revision angst — I discovered that darlings can spontaneously reincarnate.
I didn’t start a new scene to replace the deleted darling. I wasn’t looking to shoehorn dialogue and backstory from the scene into some other scene. If I had, I would’ve been trying to re-animate a dead darling, instead of letting it die and reincarnate. And we all know how well reanimation worked for Dr. Frankenstein.
While dreamstorming a completely new scene, I heard my new POV character Kat talking with her Uncle Mick. Valuable information and character development emerged in their dialogue and actions.
Then out of the blue, I heard Mick say something about the deleted backstory. I wasn’t forcing anything; the dialogue flowed naturally in my imagination and later onto the page. Kat got the information she — and the reader — need from just the right person at the right time.
I was ecstatic. This unexpected gift re-energized my drafting. The new scene won’t include all the backstory I originally drafted into the darling scene. I’ll need to be picky about what to keep.
But then, being picky about what to keep is what revision is all about.
Bane of Your Resistance 
Thank you Rosanne. Seems like a great attitude towards one’s edited material. And a good way of thinking about how we write. Do you think maybe we sometimes need to process certain mat’l that we end up not using? It is almost like ‘moving through’ material rather than writing and cutting.
And I agree with Betty. It is easy to just “cut” and “save” to another file; easier than saying good-bye forever until much further down the process.
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Thanks Marion. Yes, I agree that we need to process material we won’t use in the final draft. I know I have to write more than will ever end up in the book — I have to write (or at least imagine in detail) scenes about characters’ backstories and what happens “behind the scenes”. There’s the book we write for readers and the book we have to write for ourselves to be able to write the book for readers.
The challenge is recognizing which is which. Falling in love with darlings makes it harder to recognize stuff that is “For the Author’s Eyes Only.”
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Whenever I have to kill my darlings, or delete any portion of something I love (or think I may want to eventually use somewhere else) I create a new folder for “Cuts” in whatever writing project I’m working on, and I put the cut content there instead of just deleting it altogether. I don’t think I’ve ever gone back and resurrected anything from any of my “Cuts” folders, but I sleep a lot easier knowing I can. And it’s much easier to hit the “Delete” key for that material in the actual manuscript.
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Thanks Betty. I, too, have a Deleted folder for sections I remove from a manuscript. You’re so right about making it easier to hit Delete. Deleting at the scene level was even easier for me. (see https://baneofyourresistance.com/2014/08/22/new-book-update-an-unexpected-breakthrough/)
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This was an excellent posting Rosanna. Thanks.
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