2024 New Year's Writing Resolution: Revise Your Darlings

William Faulkner is purported to have coined the phrase: "Kill all your darlings." (Although that maxim is attributed to Faulkner, Arthur Quiller-Couch had advised writers to "murder your darlings" decades earlier in 1914.) As a piece of writing advice, "kill your darlings" is simply a warning not to become too enamored with your lovingly created turns of phrase. Like Pygmalion, falling in love with own's own creation doesn't necessarily turn out well for the creator.

This year, in keeping with my tradition of making a New Year's writing resolution, I have resolved, not to kill my darlings, but to rephrase them. I have come to the realization that my work needs some rather drastic pruning. So, I am going to revise.

Writers tend to focus on composition. The act of creation is not only enjoyable, it provides an invigorating boost to the ego. Composition relies on talent, the innate ability to observe, and put those observations into words (or music, or any art form) in a way that is memorable. But while composition begins with talent, which I maintain can't be taught, it ends with revision, which is a skill that has to be learned. 

Revising your own work requires distance. You have to read it as if you didn't write it. That is not easy. Once you have expressed something with language, those words become imprinted in your mind. Not only are they hard to forget, it is very difficult to change those words in any major way. And, of course, there is the dilemma of not knowing if they even need changing.

The best way to revise is to put your work down for a long time, not just a few days, or even weeks, but months. Write something else. Populate your mind with other words, other observations, other stories. Then, once you are thoroughly distanced, go back to your previous work and read it, not as its creator, but as a reader does, with fresh eyes.

Then ask yourself a simple question: "Am I bored?"

Good writing is not boring. It engages the senses, and stimulates thought. Most of all, it produces an emotional response. If your writing doesn't make you feel as if you are there, it needs to be revised. Descriptions need to be more vivid, insights fully expressed, feelings generated. As a writer, your writing needs to make you, its creator, laugh, cry, shrink back in horror (but in a good way).

So, dear writers, come with me on my 2024 quest to take a hacksaw to my writing and transform it into something more perfect, more genuine, more ... just more.  

(Image: Lightspring)