Erin Lodes

I dealt a little with letting go in the previous post, but I wanted to go a little deeper into that. Because there are so many kinds of letting go I had to do while getting my novel to this point. Big kinds — like reworking whole chapters — and little kinds — like deleting lovely little sentences I was attached to.

Kill your darlings, or so they say. I have the whole quote written in permanent black marker on my writing desk:

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” – Stephen King

Well I killed plenty of darlings. And let me tell you how I did it.

I lied to myself.

I mean yes, I cut out sentences and I cut out whole scenes and I rewrote whole chapters that looked completely different than they had in my fast-draft. And sometimes I could do it ruthlessly, and sometimes I would just get stuck.

I would get hung up on a paragraph where I beautifully covered a metaphor — I have a thing for metaphors — and my whole editing process would grind to a halt. So I started lying to myself.

It was a technique I heard about on a writing podcast I listen to. How to trick yourself into letting go of writing that might be good but just isn’t serving your story.

I did “save as” in Microsoft Word (I used Scrivener for my fast draft but Word for my revisions) and saved the chapter as “Ch.# version two.” Then I cut out the section I knew was giving me problems because, after all, I could go back to version one if I discovered everything else I wrote for the chapter was shit.

And here’s the thing.

I never went back.

The second version was better every single time.

And I’m not mourning my darlings, tucked away in their little virtual graveyard folder. Because I have a book now. A whole book. A good book. And whatever and whoever I had to kill to get here? Well I’m not crying while I wash the blood off my hands, let me tell you.

Okay that got a little dark but you see what I’m saying. Let go. Do whatever you have to do to keep moving forward. Cut anything you think isn’t serving the story. Kill those darlings. You won’t regret it. I certainly don’t.

How I Finished My Novel is going to be an ongoing blog series detailing how I finish this freaking thing. I know, I know, you could probably tell that from the title… I’m being helped along on this journey by John Adamus, who is amazing and you’ll hear a lot about him in this blog series.

If you haven’t already, check out Part One and start from the beginning.