Austin Kleon

You are here: Blog / Archives for editing

Relocate your darlings

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.

Colson Whitehead:

Don’t fall in love with the gentle trilling of your mellifluous sentences. Learn how to “kill your darlings.”

Ira Glass:

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.

A good editor is hard to find


Here I am with Bruce Tracy at the Guggenheim earlier this year on the Keep Going tour. Bruce edited the last four of my books and it is a sad day for me because today is his last day at Workman Publishing. (He’s off to chill in the woods and freelance.)

From the very first time we spoke on the phone, before we were even officially working together, Bruce has been a great partner in crime. It was on that very phone call (August 2011 — I’m looking at the notes right now!) that he said presentation slides are usually landscape, and books are usually portrait… so how about a square book? Sold!

When I visited him in New York, I brought him a dummy made from James Kochalka’s The Cute Manifesto — the only book I had on my shelf that had the exact trim size we were thinking about. “Can I keep this?” he asked. At the cover meeting, the late Peter Workman supposedly went through a few mocked up covers and pointed to my dummy. “That one.”

Anyways, we worked together for over eight years. A few more good stories like that, but mostly the hard, often unsexy work of patient emails and phone calls and line edits and sales meetings. It was a good run and I’m very grateful.

What’s the value of a great editor? Here’s how Michael Crichton put it, as quoted by Robert Gottlieb in The Paris Review:

In my experience of writing, you generally start out with some overall idea that you can see fairly clearly, as if you were standing on a dock and looking at a ship on the ocean. At first you can see the entire ship, but then as you begin work you’re in the boiler room and you can’t see the ship anymore. All you can see are the pipes and the grease and the fittings of the boiler room and, you have to assume, the ship’s exterior. What you really want in an editor is someone who’s still on the dock, who can say, Hi, I’m looking at your ship, and it’s missing a bow, the front mast is crooked, and it looks to me as if your propellers are going to have to be fixed.

Thank you, Bruce, for standing on the dock and helping me see the ship.

Onwards!

Reading aloud

I’m proofing the third pass of Keep Going. I find it really difficult at this stage of a project to get the right perspective — “fresh eyes” — for the thing, which makes it really, really hard to make edits.

The production schedule for this book has been much more accelerated than any of my other books, so my usual device for estranging myself from the text — the plain ol’ passing of time — hasn’t been quite as helpful.

The device that has: reading aloud.

I find that reading my work aloud makes it weird enough that I can’t scan or gloss over anything.

Reading to an audience is best, because you start really judging the thing when you have to project it into a room full of people. Quentin Tarantino says he likes to read his scripts to his friends, not for their feedback, but their presence. “I don’t want input, I don’t want you to tell me if I’m doing anything wrong, heavens forbid,” he says, “But I write a scene, and I think I’ve heard it as much as I can, but then when I read it to you … I hear it through your ears, and it lets me know I’m on the right track.”

I don’t have the time (or the friends) to bother with such a table reading, and I don’t want to pester my wife any more than I already do, so an (admittedly expensive) solution I’ve found is to put on my headphones and fire up my podcasting microphone and pretend I’m recording the audiobook. I don’t know why exactly this works, but it does. (I think it’s being able to hear my voice through the headphones.)

I mistakenly triggered one of the accessibility settings on our family TV that I can’t figure out how to turn off, so when we’re watching PBS with the kids now, in addition to the dialogue, a calm voice explains everything happening onscreen. I borrowed that for proofing the illustrations: when I get to the visual sections of the book, I’ll narrate what’s going on in the illustration, and read any text that appears. That actually helps me look at the illustration and see if there’s anything that needs fixing…

Workin’ on it (5 quick thoughts on writing)


Just finished another draft of a book proposal. 5 thoughts, none of them really new:

1) Time is really the magic ingredient for self-editing. Put it in the drawer and walk out the door. Come back later and look with fresh eyes.

2) Print out each draft and edit it by hand.

3) Wait until a new draft to make any structural changes, otherwise you’ll just spend all your time shuffling things around and not writing. (I learned this from The Clockwork Muse.)

4) When I need to make big changes to a draft (less than 10,000 words, anyways), it’s better if I just start with a blank document and just retype everything from the paper copy of the last draft. Cut & paste makes me lazy, and I don’t think about whether things are flowing or not.

5) I knew the score at the age of twelve: “Writing is easy, but it takes a lot of time.” So much time.

Above: a page from Show Your Work!

The “This Sucks” Hammer

In the most recent episode of Song Exploder, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross talk about their creative process in the studio. Reznor discusses his history with addiction, how he used to be afraid of failure in the studio, but how he now trusts “the process” to getting him somewhere. Maybe most importantly, he says that when the ideas are really coming, he’s learned to give them enough time to come forth, without worrying too much about whether they’re good or bad. “There’s plenty of time to bring out the ‘This Sucks’ hammer,” he says.

Every artist has to balance between at least two modes: call them, for lack of better terms, the creative mode and the editorial mode. In the creative mode, you don’t worry about whether things are good or bad, you just let them happen. In editorial mode, you go back and look at what you’ve got, and you ask the questions, “Is this good? Does this suck?”

Lynda Barry’s essay, “Two Questions,” from her brilliant book, What It Is, explores why and when the editorial mode appears and how you can make it go away long enough to get things on the page.  It’s essential, Barry says, “To be able to stand not knowing long enough to let something alive take shape! Without the two questions so much is possible.”

Donald Barthelme says the same in his classic essay, “Not-Knowing”:

The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the… process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention… Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing…

Fortunately for Reznor, he says he has been able to offload most of the editorial mode onto Atticus Ross, so he can stay in the creative mode — he’ll even leave the room for 20 minutes while Ross is assembling pieces of what they’ve recorded in Pro Tools (Oblique Strategy: “Go outside. Shut the door.”):

The different mindsets, or different hats one has to wear in this environment: one of them is the subconscious, follow the Muse, eyes closed, and another one, that’s radically different, is the editorial. “What sucked? What was good? What’s the piece that fits with that?” I love having [Ross] do that part, because I can stay in the other mode of not trying to analyze exactly what’s going on, and still stay subconscious. It keeps this momentum going where neither of us are bogged down too much. Our skill sets compliment each other. So, it’s him arranging stuff. I just kind of bang into things.

This is a terrific argument for collaboration, and the power of two, but for those of us who work solo, we have to try to split ourselves into two different people. We have to play the two different roles, inhabit the two different mindsets, wear the two hats. The easiest way do this, I’ve found, is to split up the modes in time: Write something without stopping, let it sit for 24 hours, or even a week, or even a year, then come back to it with the red pen. Or, make something in one space, then take it over to another space to fiddle with it. (This is why I have separate analog and digital desks in my studio: analog for creative mode, digital for editing mode.)

Most important of all, though, is to keep the “This Sucks” hammer out of reach until you’re ready for it.

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.