Killing Your Darlings

It's possible I destroy far more of my writing than I release. We are always our own critic. But, we should be ready to lose it all to get at the best.

This great blog post by J.M. Frey talks about how he and other’s have had to hard delete their creative works. It’s a good peek inside one of the most difficult things a writer can do.

Now, I don’t know where the phrase originates. Perhaps it was Hemingway (that would be a romantic thought), or some other source, but it’s a powerful statement. Sometimes, for reasons we don’t understand or can’t understand, we might need to destroy creative works that we’ve created. We cling to them. It’s often a paragraph that doesn’t work or a chapter that sounds wrong. Sometimes, on principle, we destroy something massive. We’re sad to see them go, but losing them is for the greater good.

I bring this up because recently I’ve had to kill a lot that could be construed as a darlings of mine. For example, I’d written an entire book and had a cover commissioned that I loved, while fully editing the book. Because the people I mentioned in the text didn’t give me the go-ahead, the book never saw the sunrise. Now, that could change one day, but for now, that “darling” remains killed. It was the first full book I’d ever written. Later, I would write and publish From Rent to Ruin: The True Story of My Tenant Nightmare with more on the way. So, one could say that I recovered from that.

There is some joy in the journey (or maybe that’s all the joy), but learning to just continue the work no matter what. What we’re ready to write about is not always controlled, so all we can do is follow the impulse and get it out while we can. None of us are here forever.

What all writers and creators yearn for is people seeing or reading their work. There is always a business component to this, but it’s a deep-seated desire for us to get the work out. That’s why it’s a particular kind of pain to throw away something and know it might never see the light.

Thakfully, I didn’t kill this post. Thanks for being here and reading. I appreciate you helping me exapnd the reach of this newsletter by forwarding this to anyone that might be interested.