I’ve killed my darlings thoroughly dead

You may have heard that no less than Allan Ginsberg (or Faulkner, or Eudora Welty, or Stephen King) said about writing, “Kill your Darlings”. In actuality, a man named Arthur Quiller-Couch in 1915, and what he actually said was, “Murder Your Darlings”. (Slate, 2017). By “darlings”, he meant those cherished ideas that the writer put in the first draft of the book that don’t improve plots, themes, or readability.

Yesterday, I thoroughly killed my darlings in Gaia’s Hands, my first book and the one that just went through its latest round of rejections. Knowing what I know now about plot, theme, and readability, I proceeded to take my knife and do the following to the first third of the book:

1) Reduce the number of “first person characters” from four back to the original two. The story really belongs to Josh and Jeanne anyway.
2) Tweak out parts of the story that related to Eric and Annie’s first person viewpoint. Many words were lost.
3) Put more emphasis on the escalating threat to Jeanne and her reasoning not to tell anyone. If there’s a “main” character of the remaining two, it’s Jeanne.

There’s a lot of work to do, because I’m likely to lose 1/3 of this book cutting out some of the “fun” but uninformative scenes, and will have to fill in with things that better advance the story.

It’s going to be impossible to show you the changes, because it’s difficult to point out what’s missing and why this hunk of deleted prose deserved to die. Instead, I will give you the first threat Jeanne receives, which seems really par for the course for an academic:

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