WHA-A-AT?
There's a tale that the French short story writer Guy de Maupassant, as a young writer starting out, was mentored by the poet Alfred de Musset who was older and more established. They used to go for walks in the park and de Musset would teach the younger writer the skills he had acquired in his own writing life. 'Murder your darlings' was perhaps his most famous piece of advice.
Well that's the story I heard from my English teacher when I was 16. It appears to be rather fictional itself! It seems, for instance, that de Maupassant's mentor was actually the novelist Gustave Flaubert – which is much more likely, as he was only seven when Alfred de Musset died. As for the famous advice, Wikipedia says it is 'commonly misattributed' and was actually written by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. The evidence supports this. But in any case, what on earth does it mean?
This. If there's something in a piece of writing you've just done that you are inordinately proud of, something that really strikes you as a fine bit of writing, something that you're so attached to that you might throw the rest away so long as you get to keep THAT word or THAT line ... or paragraph, or chapter ... that's probably the very thing you should discard.
Why? Because it's probably self-indulgent, and is liable to stick out in a way so jarring that it works against delivering your message.
Let's change the context for a minute and think of watching a movie. What we want is to believe in what we're seeing, if only for that little while when we're actually seeing it. 'The willing suspension of disbelief,' it's been called. If we find ourselves admiring a particularly fine piece of acting, we have lost the illusion; we have stopped believing in the character. It's only afterwards, leaving the cinema, that we should notice, 'Oh, what a terrific piece of acting; I forgot I was watching a movie.' It is the same for a fine piece of writing that we notice. If it's noticeable, for that moment we've lost the thread of what we're reading. It's more effective if the reader gets lost in the words and only afterwards realises what wonderful words they were and how beautifully they were put together.
There are some good articles on the subject online, e.g. at
Easy Way to Write, MindTWEAKS, Poynteronline and, wait for it, Murder Your Darlings. I cite them all, because they're full of good stuff on that and related matters.
All this does NOT mean you should become completely lacking in discernment about your writing. How can you edit and revise if you can't tell good from bad? That's rather the point, in fact. It's a matter of telling what's good or bad in context. The detailed factual presentation needed in a piece of technical writing could be a complete turn-off in a novel. The slangy, conversational tone suitable for a personal blog might be highly inappropriate for a Ph.D. thesis. And so on. Of course don't edit as you write; let it all pour out at white heat if possible and refine it later – but when you do edit, you will need to be dispassionate, even ruthless, about what's working and what isn't.
How to tell if something is a 'darling' to be murdered? That's easy. Are you attached to it? Do you feel a wrench at the thought it might have to go? Would you want to retain it even if that risked weakening the piece as a whole? That's the one!
- Rosemary (Facilitator)
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Descriptive Writing
Yesterday we focused on describing places. One person said she wasn't good at it, and wanted more practice. She always found herself concentrating on people and dialogue instead.
First I had everyone remember a place that had made an impact on them at some time in their lives, think themselves back into that situation and describe the place. I told them to include sounds and smells as well as what they could see. I shared something I learned many years ago from Faith Richmond, author of a memoir called Remembrance: when describing a scene from your childhood, imagine yourself that small again, and picture the table edge high above your head or whatever. That is, see the scene from the child's perspective, remembering how that looked. It's amazing how much more recall you get by doing that! One such detail will lead to a whole flood of others.
Then I had people look out the nearest window and describe what they saw through it. (This brought groans from some.)
As always, the same topic – and even the same view – produced a variety of responses. The woman who focuses on people still did that in her remembered scene and thought she'd failed the exercise. But she included some very descriptive background touches, which set the scene beautifully for the action taking place; it was just that she herself hadn't realised that! I didn't have a person in mine at all except for the narrative 'I' and wondered if I'd been boring, but several people sighed with delight at what I read them. 'Bloody poet,' muttered one (but she was grinning). A woman who also attends the same meditation group as me wrote almost ethereal descriptions full of lyricism. Our resident dry humourist still managed to sound that way despite herself. A new member revealed the sensibilities of a poet although she hasn't thought of herself that way. One person praised the beauty of the garden outside the window; another considered it neglected and ugly.
'I think it's who we are,' said the people person to the humorist, after they'd cracked us all up with their equally unsentimental views of the garden.
Afterwards I instructed everyone to take their own pieces out of the equation and then I asked, were there any pieces that didn't succeed in making pictures in our heads, were there any that didn't hold our interest? No, there were not. It became clear that we can all look at something and write a description of it, and that we'll all do it differently and that's fine.
The remark was correct – it IS 'who we are' that informs our writing. We are going to reveal ourselves in our writing no matter what we do; it can't be avoided. And that's the very thing that makes our writing interesting.
I shared two last secrets with them:
1) With descriptions of people, it's effective to focus on only one or two striking features and leave the rest to the reader's imagination – a crooked nose, for instance, or a constant, fretful movement of the hands. As Fay Weldon advised in Letters to Alice, a light dusting of freckles across her nose tells people a girl is pretty without you having to say so. It is the same with descriptions of place – single out only one or two things to mention; you don't have to give every tiny detail.
2) In my own reading, long descriptive passages are the bits I skip – no matter how beautifully written those descriptions may be. When I confessed that, there was a chorus of agreement. Which leads us right back to 1).
- Rosemary (Facilitator)
First I had everyone remember a place that had made an impact on them at some time in their lives, think themselves back into that situation and describe the place. I told them to include sounds and smells as well as what they could see. I shared something I learned many years ago from Faith Richmond, author of a memoir called Remembrance: when describing a scene from your childhood, imagine yourself that small again, and picture the table edge high above your head or whatever. That is, see the scene from the child's perspective, remembering how that looked. It's amazing how much more recall you get by doing that! One such detail will lead to a whole flood of others.
Then I had people look out the nearest window and describe what they saw through it. (This brought groans from some.)
As always, the same topic – and even the same view – produced a variety of responses. The woman who focuses on people still did that in her remembered scene and thought she'd failed the exercise. But she included some very descriptive background touches, which set the scene beautifully for the action taking place; it was just that she herself hadn't realised that! I didn't have a person in mine at all except for the narrative 'I' and wondered if I'd been boring, but several people sighed with delight at what I read them. 'Bloody poet,' muttered one (but she was grinning). A woman who also attends the same meditation group as me wrote almost ethereal descriptions full of lyricism. Our resident dry humourist still managed to sound that way despite herself. A new member revealed the sensibilities of a poet although she hasn't thought of herself that way. One person praised the beauty of the garden outside the window; another considered it neglected and ugly.
'I think it's who we are,' said the people person to the humorist, after they'd cracked us all up with their equally unsentimental views of the garden.
Afterwards I instructed everyone to take their own pieces out of the equation and then I asked, were there any pieces that didn't succeed in making pictures in our heads, were there any that didn't hold our interest? No, there were not. It became clear that we can all look at something and write a description of it, and that we'll all do it differently and that's fine.
The remark was correct – it IS 'who we are' that informs our writing. We are going to reveal ourselves in our writing no matter what we do; it can't be avoided. And that's the very thing that makes our writing interesting.
I shared two last secrets with them:
1) With descriptions of people, it's effective to focus on only one or two striking features and leave the rest to the reader's imagination – a crooked nose, for instance, or a constant, fretful movement of the hands. As Fay Weldon advised in Letters to Alice, a light dusting of freckles across her nose tells people a girl is pretty without you having to say so. It is the same with descriptions of place – single out only one or two things to mention; you don't have to give every tiny detail.
2) In my own reading, long descriptive passages are the bits I skip – no matter how beautifully written those descriptions may be. When I confessed that, there was a chorus of agreement. Which leads us right back to 1).
- Rosemary (Facilitator)
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