Wednesday 4 December 2013

Killing off your darlings

I have always said that I write fast and edit slow, by which I mean that I hurl words onto the page then spent most of the time working and reworking them, rather like a sculptor finishing a work. A little chip here, another one there.

Sometimes I wish I worked differently but there you are. It’s the way my mind is wired.
However, I do feel that this editing process is crucial and an example cropped up when I was finishing a recent novel.

There was a scene, an important scene, in which there was a death in a place containing thirty people.

It was a deliberately confused scene and my detectives interviewed several witnesses to try to ascertain what had happened.

Interviewed too many people, in fact. Three characters pointlessly repeated each other and one was created entirely for the scene and did not appear anywhere else in the novel.

So, the first two characters had their lines cut and it also became clear that the newly-created one really was not needed at all.

Even though I quite liked her in the short time we had known each other, she had to go. Murdered by the delete button.

The result? A scene with added pace and zip and much cleaner narrative flow. A fine sacrifice by my character indeed.

Why does this come to mind? Well, today I am planning a talk in a few weeks entitled Getting away with murder. When I give it, I’ll give a little nod to the character I killed off!

John Dean

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