The Wheels on the Bus Go Round & Round — until they fall off!
That moment when you are writing a novel and you know you have to kill ALL your darlings — that moment!
So I’m writing a novel. Yes, cliché — every journalist has a book inside of them, it’s just that sometimes it may not be a very good book. It’s meant to be a science fiction crime/detective story set in a dystopian future . This is a problem in itself because this makes it a cross-genre topic which is harder to sell because lovers of crime fiction aren’t necessarily lovers of sci-fi — and vice versa.
However there is another bigger problem: namely the manuscript so far sucks. My protagonist comes across as a rather smug, self-satisfied git — except when he’s a self-pitying git. And he’s also a bit of a smart aleck — and nobody likes a know-it-all. The supporting characters (so far) are rather one-dimensional, especially the women, while the plot is not so much a whodunit as a ‘is anyone ever going to do anything?’
What is good (I say modestly) is the world-building unfortunately I’ve successfully built a boring world (in which nothing very exciting ever happens). I’m also (and this is a trait I was guilty of in another novel I wrote) spending way too much time going into the minutiae of travel and eating arrangements. To many journey planners, beverages and bread-based snacks do not for an interesting story make.
Now I suppose I could try to rescue the story (I’m currently at the 20,000 words mark) but I fear I would just be wasting my time and delaying the inevitable. Not least because I’ve been this way before with a novel (another unfeasible cross-genre outing) which went off to various agents (it ran to around 110,000 words) in 2020 and sank without a trace. The main complaint from the agents who actually replied was that: my protagonist came across as a rather smug, self-satisfied git — except when he was a self-pitying git; that he was also a bit of a smart aleck — nobody likes a know-it-all; the supporting characters were one-dimensional, especially the women; while the plot fell into a ‘who cares’ black hole.
Yes there was also too much minutiae of travel and eating arrangements. And while the world-building was cracking (British-English usage of the word cracking = extremely good) I completely swamped would-be readers with an overkill of facts. Too much already!
But back to the present novel… I realise I’ve fallen in love with my protagonist and made him insufferable so it’s time to follow that well-known writerly advice of killing all my darlings. Although in this case it’s not just a few characters who are getting the chop but everything is going. The Big Red <DELETE FILE> Button has to be pressed otherwise in another 90,000 words I’ll have another clunker on my hands.
Cutting my losses now also frees me up to start writing something else although this time I won’t become obsessed with the protagonist, I’ll focus more on the action, it’ll fit into an easily recognisable genre, and mentions of beverages and bread-products will be kept to a minimum!
Final Thought: who first coined the phrase Kill all your Darlings?
A quick Google search attributes the phrase to, among others, Oscar Wilde, G.K. Chesterton, William Faulkner, and Stephen King however the smart money is on an English writer of about a century ago, namely Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. In his wrote in his 1916 book On the Art of Writing he wrote: If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this — 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.
That said Stephen King’s more recent advice in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft probably sums it up more forcefully: Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.
