Today I saw someone tweet, “Your ideas aren’t very good if nobody steals them.”
Which at first might sounds like something I approve of, but actually, there are lots of bad ideas that get stolen and recycled all the time. (See: racism, fascism, etc.)
Ideas only travel as far as the minds ready and willing to take them in.
If your ideas are really, really good (see: the Beatitudes, universal health care, etc.) they might have a much harder time being stolen.
Looking at this manuscript by Jean-Paul Sartre, I was reminded of the writing advice, “kill your darlings,” which is widely attributed to Faulkner, but can be traced to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s lecture, “On Style,” from On the Art of Writing:
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.
You hear this murderous advice all over the place: Kill your darlings.
Stephen King, in On Writing:
kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.
Don’t fall in love with the gentle trilling of your mellifluous sentences. Learn how to “kill your darlings.”
It’s time to kill. And it’s time to enjoy the killing. Because by killing, you will make something else even better live. Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.
This is a very important point — like with gardening, when you cut dead things back, you encourage new growth — which is echoed by Mary Karr, who routinely throws out hundreds of pages:
I’ve just pitched out 150 pgs it took 3 years to write: NORMAL!!! Some pieces may make it into the new draft but am basically starting over. The old pages stood in line for me to write them. So despite having 0 pages, I’m closer than before
Some writers like Diana Athill suggest a gentler but still ruthless approach:
You don’t always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they’d be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it’s the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)
The trouble with murdering your darlings, as with all editing, is knowing what to cut out and what to leave in. (Writers employ editors for the same reason doomed pet owners leave euthanizing to their veterinarians.)
“The hardest thing is to kill your darlings,” says Paula Uruburu. “But you have to.”
Or someone has to.
I think “kill your darlings” has done more good than damage in the world, but I’m a much bigger fan of this advice, which is easier on my heart: Relocate your darlings.
“One of the most difficult tasks is to rigorously delete what has no function,” writes Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes.
This becomes much easier when you move the questionable passage into another document and tell yourself you might use them later. For every document I write, I have another called “xy-rest.doc,” and every single time I cut something, I copy it into the other document, convincing myself that I will later look through it and add it back to where it might fit. Of course, it never happens — but it still works.
One of my favorite writers, Eliza Gabbert, has built a whole revision strategy around this idea, which she summarizes as: “Keep your best line (or image or idea) and trash the rest.”
She calls this the opposite of the murder your darlings advice, and suggests starting a whole new piece around your darling:
Start a whole new file. (Or, if you write longhand, turn to a new page.) In other words, don’t just keep making changes to the same version. You need to be able to see your darling in a new context. This will also help you start fresh without feeling like you’ve abandoned your other lines – they’re not deleted, they’re not dead, they’re just sleeping in another file. You can always go back to them. (I’ve actually used the same line or idea or image, if I was really in love with it, in multiple published poems. There’s no law against self-plagiarism!)
This advice has saved me over and over again, and it can also lead to new work. I’ve chopped a whole section of darlings from one book only to have them fit beautifully into another.
And what is a blog if not the perfect place to put your murdered darlings? (David Markson once referred to the internet as “that first-draft world.”)
I think of it this way: not murdering the darlings, but relocating them, so you might re-home them later.
Usually when a client hires me to speak, they’re interested in one talk, so I either have to narrow down the scope of what I’m going to talk about, or I have to try to weave in elements from all of my work into some kind of unified theory. A client recently hired me to do something I’ve never done before: three talks over three days!
Conveniently, I have a trilogy of books that map nicely to 3 talks, but because each subsequent book after Steal grew out of the one before it, there’s a bit of crosstalk between them. (For example, the chapters “Something small, every day” from Show, “Every day is Groundhog Day” from Keep Going, and “Be Boring” from Steal all speak to the idea of daily practice and routine.) So, funny enough, I’m combining what I usually do for talks: narrowing each book down to an essential idea, and then building up each talk by weaving in material from all over…
Here are 10 books that helped me through the spring, listed in the order I read them:
Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties
Ian MacDonald
Have you heard of the Beatles? They were pretty good. This is probably the best book about the band I’ve ever read. I love how saucy MacDonald gets: of “A Day in the Life,” arguably the high point of their achievement, he writes, “More nonsense has been written about this recording than anything else The Beatles produced.” Of Paul’s granny music: “If any single recording shows why The Beatles broke up, it is MAXWELL’S SILVER HAMMER.” A highlight for me is when MacDonald points out that how many of the big British bands of the sixties were made up of kids who went to art school. (Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who, etc.) You could blow up the chronology stuffed in the back and make another book out of it.
The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands
edited by Huw Lewis-Jones
A downright gorgeous book. I’ve always been a bit obsessed with maps and even started my own collection of imaginary maps way back in 2008. If I’d have owned this book when I was doing my undergrad thesis, who knows, maybe I’d be a novelist? The Writer’s Map would pair well with Peter Turchi’s book, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer.
The Order of Time
Carlo Rovelli
Beautifully written — which really means it was beautifully translated from the Italian by husband/wife team Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. I found out while writing this post that Segre died unexpectedly this year. Rovelli said, “They not only captured perfectly my meaning but they could completely render the feeling and sound of my Italian — and improve it, because their English language is remarkably beautiful and rich.” (I also read the couple’s translation of Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.)
The Sabbath
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Another book about time, specifically, an exploration of Judaism as a religion obsessed with the architecture of time. As the rabbi explains, each Sabbath is a kind of a mini-eternity — something to look forward to. I picked this up after reading Beth Pickens’ Make Your Art No Matter What, and the two books together influenced me to rethink how I go about my weekends.
Emerson: The Mind on Fire
Robert D. Richardson
The great reading project of my spring was reading Richardson’s trilogy of biographies: Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (so good which was so good Annie Dillard wrote him a fan letter and they wound up getting married), Emerson: The Mind on Fire (which I swear reads in spots like he was showing off for his new partner), and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. (I also read his short biography of his mentor, the biographer Walter Jackson Bate.) Emerson is my favorite of the three and set me on a path of rethinking my indexing and filing systems. If you’re new to Richardson’s work, I might start with First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process.
The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live
Sarah Susanka with Kira Obolensky
This is a book I found while picking through my wife’s shelf of architecture books. It was partly inspired by two of my all-time favorite books — How Buildings Learn and A Pattern Language — and it has a very simple but strong premise: when it comes to houses, the quality of the space is more important than the quantity of the square footage. (Our family lives in a small 1949 bungalow, so the idea obviously appeals.) Before you buy a new house or remodel, give it a read.
Conversations of Goethe
Johann Peter Eckermann
This was a favorite book of Emerson and some of the other transcendentalists. Eckermann was 31 when he met the 74-year-old Goethe, and this book is a record of their conversations over nine years. Like many old books, this book is a great reminder that human beings have always been hilarious — I love how Eckermann will ask a question and Goethe goes into these long monologues that read almost stand-up routines. “The truth must be repeated over and over,” Goethe said. “My merit is, that I have found it also, that I have said it again, and that I have striven to bring the truth once more into a confused world.”
Weather
Jenny Offill
Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation is one of my favorite books about art and motherhood, so I’m not sure why it took me so long to read her followup. (Both could go on my list of good books you could finish in an afternoon.) The book was written before the pandemic, but it contains a brilliant sentence that sums it up: “And then it is another day and another and another but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.” (Try to get the hardcover with a jacket by John Gall.)
How to Take Smart Notes
Sönke Ahrens
Several people recommended this to me after my post about indexing and file systems. Not sure if I’ll go for a full Zettelkasten or not, but it’s one of the better books I’ve read about writing. (I really wish I’d read it in college.) Like a book it’s influenced by, David Allen’s Getting Things Done, it’s deeper and more Zen than you might expect. Ahrens’ insight is simple, but huge: if you arrange your writing and reading life correctly, you never really have to stare at a blank page or start from scratch.
Wendy, Master of Art
Walter Scott
I feel like you can’t go wrong with a good sendup of art school. Anybody who went is like, Oh god, this is too real, and anybody who didn’t can laugh and feel smug. The only comic book I read this spring, which makes me want to go out and catch up with everything I’ve missed.
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As a bonus, here are some pictures and sound I enjoyed…
TV: I loved Hacks and The Knick.
Music: the new Pharaoh Sanders record was wonderful, Vikingur Olaffson made me fall in love with “Bruyères” on the piano, and while I’ve loved Violator since college when my drawing teacher played it on repeat, Depeche Mode 101 turned me into a huge fan of the band.
Documentaries: Oliver Sacks: His Own Life and The Donut King.
Buddy comedies: Midnight Run and Plan B.
Swashbucklers: Captain Blood and The Duellists.
Movies that were as great as people said they were: Sing Street, The Mitchells vs.The Machines, and Sound of Metal.
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When I was growing up, my parents would occasionally mark my height on the wall with my name and the date in pencil. One day I was drawing chalk outlines with my kids in the driveway and I dreamed up this art project that I wish I’d have thought to start when they were babies.
Instructions:
If you have babies or small children, feel free to steal this idea and send me pictures of the results!
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