Necromance Your Darlings

Killing your darlings doesn't have to be the end...

This week the brilliant Brian Evenson was visiting one of my classes and one of my students asked how he handled picking an idea in stories when there are so many directions any story can go. Evenson said, quite correctly, that you just have to pick an idea and see where it goes. But he added something really important that perhaps isn’t said enough to young writers: you can always use the other ideas in other stories. Picking one direction doesn’t mean you can’t venture the other paths in your subsequent journeys.

This reminded me about this newsletter idea I’ve had sitting in my drafts and been meaning to finish… mostly because I liked the title: Necromance Your Darlings. Heh. But beyond the joke, I do believe in this principle. Yes, killing your darlings is good, but often my best stories have come from resurrecting my murdered darlings in new and horrible forms.

I should probably clarify what I mean by “kill your darlings,” since like many writing clichés—from “write what you know” to “show don’t tell”—it’s often interpreted in strange ways. I’ve seen people claim it means you should always cut your favorite part of any story or poem. Or even that you should literally have your favorite characters die in your novels. While the latter isn’t bad advice, perhaps, the original meaning of “kill your darlings” was actually about cutting overly ornamental prose. The phrase is attributed to dozens of famous writers from William Faulkner to Anton Chekhov, but the earliest known attribution belongs to (the very Britishly named) Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch in his 1914 Cambridge lecture “On Style”:

[I]f 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.’

So the original meaning is to cut overly flowery, writerly prose. This is also good enough advice, although also not what the phrase has come to mean. These days “kill your darlings” is used to mean that you have to be ruthless in cutting lines, characters, ideas, or anything else that doesn’t serve the story. This is the kind of principle that we can all agree with in principle yet can be hard to enact. The writing process is so full of failures and setbacks that when we manage to eek out something powerful or interesting in a session it is hard to admit to ourselves that, while it might be fantastic in isolation, if it doesn’t work in the context of the story then it needs to go. You’ve got to select that darling and drop you finger on the guillotine of the delete key.

This doesn’t mean that you have to be some economical fiction machine in which anything that doesn’t immediately move forward the plot must be cut. I don’t agree with that at all. But the pieces of your story should work together. A very funny line might ruin the atmosphere of a horror story. An overly clever observation might not fit the character’s POV. And so on. When something doesn’t fit into the work, it is almost always best to bring out your editorial knife and stab.

But there is another thing to keep in mind: death is not the end.

The focus on editorial ruthlessness is useful for young writers, who are almost always in want of it. Yet it is also important to remind oneself that ideas do not go away. They can always be pulled out of the drawer. There’s no reason a darling that’s dead in one story won’t bloom beautifully in another.

Many years ago, I wrote a story called “Country Air” about three friends in NYC who drive upstate to see “the kind of green that’s good for the soul.” Wacky and weird adventures ensued. There was a lot I loved about the story, including the sorta hate triangle between the three characters and the strange atmosphere of their drive in the woods. But the story didn’t work. I “trunked” it as they say. Some years later I carved it up—with help from the genius Diane Williams—from an eight-page short story into a taut and eerie flash story. A lot of darlings had to go to cut it down that far. The result worked though and was published in NOON as “Air” in 2010.

Yet some of the material from original story—that didn’t fit into “Air”—stuck with me. I let those ideas percolate and evolve and twist and then, again years later, wrote a kind of Sam Lipstye meets Lovecraft horror story called “Dark Air” that was published in my collection Upright Beasts and also in Granta in 2015. (I promise I don’t put “Air” in all my titles.) The story grew out of the bones of my murdered darlings, but bloomed into something completely different. Whereas “Air” is a 500-word realist flash story, “Dark Air” is a 7,000-word science fiction horror tale. Still, I’d never have written the latter without killing some darlings to make the former.

Many stories for many writers work this way, in my experience. Ideas never go away. They can be resurrected whenever you need. And indeed they can be resurrected over and over, turning into a different creature each time.

Too often in writing we have the idea that ideas are singular. That we exhaust them in the a given story and must move on to the next. But in other artforms, like painting, countless variations of an idea is the norm. How many times did René Magritte paint men in bowler hats or variations on a window shattering with the image of the background? Does it matter?

That’s probably a rant for another newsletter.

For now, let me just say that you should kill all the darlings you want. Sow the fields with their corpses. Grind their bones into dust and salt the earth. But. If some of those corpses start to twitch , if they become animated in a new context or if they Frankenstein together with other ideas into terrifying creatures, then embrace them. Help them grow. Gather them together into new stories and release them to wreck havoc across the realms…

Trying to stick with the necromancer theme here at the end

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Other works I’ve written or co-edited include Upright Beasts (my story collection), Tiny Nightmares (an anthology of horror fiction), and Tiny Crimes (an anthology of crime fiction).