Do You Really Need To Kill Your Darlings? An Editing Question
When you are a writer, people frequently tell you to write lean. That you have to slice off anything that isn’t relevant to your story or article. It is drummed into our heads everywhere from the ‘Strunk and White’ style book to booktubers that we must cut unnecessary words, scenes, and characters.
This wasn’t always the case. If you have ever picked up some famous works from the 1800’s, you will notice immediately the pointless scenes, info dumping, and excess verbiage. It’s Hemmingway and the Strunk and White guide book that started our modern tendency to streamline, and they come from the 20th century.
They weren’t completely wrong, but they weren’t completely right either. Let’s break this down.
In Non-Fiction
On my website, I frequently write reviews of books. A lot of the time, I will have a subsection of the review titled ‘Why is this here?’ and that will be the part of the review where I complain about stuff that the author crammed in for reasons that I do not understand.
It’s obvious in non-fiction when a writer is cramming something in that does not fit. When Harold Schechter added a whole chapter comparing the Belle Gunness case to the Bloody Benders case, you become aware that he is padding the word count when he just doesn’t have much information.
On the other hand, there is such a thing as context. Including information about how insurance and lonely heart’s advertisements worked in a book about Belle Gunness gives a reader a better idea of how she operated and why she got away with as much as she did. In fact, there has been a real trend in True Crime writing to add context to crime reporting, taking out some of the baseless sensationalism and giving a case the chance to illuminate aspects of our society.
In Fiction
Many new writers are dinged for giving blow-by-blow descriptions of events that don’t do anything for the story . I was editing a mystery story of mine where I included a whole five paragraphs where two of my protagonists negotiated with an inn-keeper for a bed. When I was writing the rough draft and getting out words, I wanted to tell everyone how my beloved characters had to pay extra for stabling their horse and that the inn-keeper wanted to charge an outrageous extra fee for a brazier in the middle of winter.
I don’t know why anyone had to know that. The inn-keeper is never coming back and nothing about the inn effects the story at all.
On the other hand, there is worldbuilding, character development, and atmosphere. ‘Good Omens’ has a ton of unnecessary episodes, but those make the tone of the book and are part of why it is so beloved.
Necessary? A Problem?
I cut the scene at the inn because it didn’t add anything to an already bloated story. I had a full scene of my main lady bargaining for barley with Sir Price Gouger, and the inciting incident of the plot is that a cart of food and salt goes missing, endangering our heroes. I think the audience gets it: this is a world of scarcity and our protagonists have to budget.
But I’m inclined to leave in a long passage about a duchess organizing the young women she is training into teams to put up Christmas decorations. Or a couple paragraphs of a little boy trying to get my other male and female protagonists, his parents, to help him hunt down a top his friend is hiding from him. It illuminates the relationships involved and lightens a tone when there is a serial killer, a spy, and cart thieves on the loose.
What I am saying is that not all your darlings must be ruthlessly murdered in their beds. There is nothing wrong with slice-of-life interludes and side chapters about something tangentially related to your main topic.
However, you will lose readers if you ramble too much. A book or article is a little like taking a walk, and not everyone wants to stroll aimlessly in unfamiliar territory. It is a matter of taste, ultimately, but you do have rein in your excesses sometime.