Murdering darlings

"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it--wholeheartedly--and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."

So said Arthur Quiller-Couch in 1916 in one of a series of lectures he gave while teaching at the University of Cambridge. The series was called 'On The Art of Writing' and Quiller-Couch, who often wrote under the minimalist pseudonym 'Q', was of the belief that part of the art was knowing that less is often more. 

I like the phrase 'murder your darlings' because it conveys how attached a writer can become to certain words and phrases and also the agony that therefore ensues when, for one reason or another, he or she is asked to 'take them out'.

I had 'a darling' in my novel - an image to which I had become very attached. When I received the proofs back from my editor she suggested the line with this image in it should be removed. It was confusing, she said.

The agony. The line wasn't working and I should have put it out of its pain immediately - murdered it. But as Q would have put it, I had the urge to perpetrate this 'piece of exceptionally fine writing' and I let it suffer on. I took the line out - and then put it back in again. Lather, rinse, repeat. When I finally got the strength to do what had been suggested and stick to it,  I was so muddled that I didn't have the wherewithal do it cleanly. I ended up with something even I didn't understand. Eventually, the line was removed altogether.

Raymond Chandler apparently kept notebooks full of images. When he wrote his novels he called on them. If that's how he arrived at the  likes of "I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars" then treasuring an image and slotting it into the narrative certainly worked for him. My guess is that for a lot of writers that's not a method which would work. The narrative would end up being built round a cluster of dazzling images, most losing their lustre and their meaning in a storyline that became contrived. At least, that's what would happen in my case.

Narrative first. Jewels as are fitting. Any darlings - murder them. Immediately.