Yesterday, enjoying my Sunday ritual, coffee while watching CBS Sunday Morning, correspondent David Pogue paid tribute to his mentor Stephen Sondheim. In the feature, the subject of editing came up. I was just talking to my daughter on the phone a few days ago when we started talking about writing. I asked her which of her high school teachers, if any, had helped her with her writing.
“Honestly, I wasn’t until law school. I had a professor who said cut, cut, cut.”
It rang true. In Rain Dodging you meet my Oxford professor. He agreed to beta read for me and here is one of his comments:
“I think that this would (painful though it will be!) benefit from being shorter – so an edit that just goes through coldly and asks whether everything is necessary, and whether the way you put it really distils your intentions for having it there.”
“Oh, Jesse, for months my mantra has been: Does it move the story forward? Does it move the story forward? Does it move the story forward? “
The quotation, “In writing, you must kill all your darlings,” is mainly attributed to William Faulkner. However, in the early 20th century, Cornish writer and literary critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) was an earlier source of the popular writers’ adage “murder your darlings. In his Cambridge inaugural lecture series, published as On the Art of Writing, he said,
“If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
Sorry Rain Dodging, darling, 35 pages slashed!
