Murder Your Darlings

On the Art of Writing
By Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

Toolbox: You will write things you love. That's wonderful. Enjoy that feeling. During revision, though, ask yourself a crucial question. Does that gorgeous passage or that clever thought support your main idea? If not, take it out. You do not have to "murder" that darling metaphor. You can save it for another story on another day.

One of the most famous bits of writing advice comes to us from British author Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, known to his mates and university students as Q. (He should not be confused with the Quartermaster, played by actor Desmond Llewelyn, who provides 007 with those wonderful gadgets in the James Bond movies.)

"Murder your darlings," Q ordered his students in 1914. When his lectures were published, he emphasized the imperative in italics: "Murder your darlings." Thank you, Q, for giving me a title for this book.

In America the phrase has been misattributed (sometimes to Orwell) and misquoted as "Kill your babies." Like other short sentences, "Murder your darlings" has the ring of truth, made more shocking because Q's commandment bumps into a more famous one from Mount Sinai: "Thou shalt not kill."

The eccentric Professor Q described exactly what he meant in the lecture "On Style," the final chapter in his book On the Art of Writing. Before he offered his own definition of what writing style is, he argued for what style is not:

Freeze frame. As I read that passage, I imagine I am a university student at Cambridge in 1914—not yet facing trench warfare in France or the Spanish flu pandemic, seeing only a world of language and letters before me, sitting on the edge of my chair in the lecture hall, a quill in my hand, waiting to record the wisdom of Professor Q:

As Q delivered this message, the Oxford English Dictionary was chugging along toward completion, so it seems only right to check the OED for a definition of darling. Derived from Old English, it denotes a "dear one," more broadly: "A person who is very dear to another; the object of a person's love; one dearly loved. Commonly used as a term of endearing address."

For Q, then, it is not enough to murder a word, phrase, or passage that you like—or even love. His sadism requires you to commit verbicide on the words you love the most. Your darlings. In human terms, your favorite child; perhaps, your blushing bride; dare I say it, your sainted mother.

Here is where, for me, Q's metaphor met real life.

Travel back with me to March 2017. A series of phone calls informs me that my alma mater, Providence College in Rhode Island, wants to give me an honorary degree: Doctor of Journalism. More significant, the president, Father Brian Shanley, asks me to deliver the commencement address in celebration of the college's centennial. I am struck dumb.

I had read speeches in front of big crowds before, but nothing like this. My assignment was to inspire and delight 1,200 graduates and a stadium crowd numbering about 10,000. From the moment I said yes to the moment I delivered the goods on Sunday, May 21, my stomach hurt.

This felt like the greatest honor of my professional life, with deep connections to family and friends. Over the next hundred days I thought of little else but that speech. Without committing a word to paper or screen, I spent a month in bed, in the shower, over coffee, behind the wheel, rehearsing the imagined text. When friends asked, "How's it going?" I would try out the occasional theme statement or funny line, forming a kind of ad hoc focus group.

I calculated that I could deliver about 2,000 words in 15 minutes. By early May I had a first draft. It spread to 8,000 words. I did the math. I had prepared a speech that would take at least an hour to read. I knew my remarks would come near the end of the ceremony, with a huge audience butt-numb from more than two hours of sitting. I imagined I was on the stage of the Apollo Theater, where on Amateur Night bad performers might be dragged offstage with a hook. I would be like the guy who spoke for two hours at Gettysburg before Lincoln got his two minutes.

"You were selected," said a friend, "because you wrote a book on SHORT writing."

"Yes," I responded, "but it was a BOOK about short writing."

In examining my first draft, I loved everything I had written. What was I to do? A voice with a British accent invaded my thoughts: "Murder your darlings." So that's what I did. I murdered my mother.

Before I confess the how and why of it, let me turn back to Q's directive.

"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."

Notice that Q does not say "Don't write down the words you love best." He encourages us to write them down—almost as a way of purging them from our system. Draft, purge, murder. Before you murder that darling, you must create it. The murder comes through revision. That reveals Q to be a "putter-inner" rather than a "taker-outter," the type of writer who puts it all in during drafting and cuts ruthlessly during revision.

In my 8,000-word first draft, I included eight references to my mom. Two things conspired to make my early draft so Mom-heavy. The first was my misunderstanding that the commencement was scheduled for Mother's Day, when in fact it came a week later. The second was a ghostlike visit from Mom in the form of a long-saved voice-mail message. Mom died in March of 2015, closing in on the age of ninety-six. Looking for a lost message, I stumbled upon this saved one, which began, "Hello, Roy. This is your mother. Remember me? The one who created you?"

She was inquiring about someone in the family, but out of that context, this felt like a visitation, and it led me to reflect upon my favorite Shirley Clark anecdotes, some of which were pure entertainment, others that carried potential lessons for the graduate. Two examples will suffice.

There was much more, but you get it. I had a lot to work with. And I thought the mothers of the graduates would be pleased to hear me honor my own mom on this special day.

How do you turn an 8,000-word text into 2,000?

Maybe I did not have to murder my mom; I could just select the best of her multiple personalities. Over days and then weeks, the text grew shorter and shorter. Eight references to mom became five, became three, became one. Became none.

Why did she have to make the ultimate sacrifice? Because the speech was not about her. Mom was nothing more than the scaffolding for my story, the parts I had to erect until I learned what I really wanted to say, what I thought the graduates really needed to hear.

The short version of my theme derived from the meaning of the name of the college, Providence, as expressed in an old religious saying I learned in eighth grade: "God writes straight with crooked lines." I told the graduates that out of high school I did not want to attend Providence. I wanted to go to Princeton, but did not get in.

"It turns out I was never, ever accepted to the place I thought I wanted to be, but in retrospect I always wound up at the place I needed to be. Only looking over my shoulder could I see that pattern. Time after time, what I had experienced as Disappointment became transformed into Opportunity."

My brothers, Ted and Vincent, offered their opinions on what Mom would have thought about being elbowed out of the final draft in favor of a little light theology. I should mention that Shirley Clark was very theatrical and wrote and directed many community variety shows. She may never have murdered a darling, but our best guess is that in some corner of heaven she has Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in a chokehold.

Lessons

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
By William Zinsser

Toolbox: Like William Zinsser, assume that your third draft, even your fifth draft, maybe your eleventh draft, contains too many words. But how can you cut clutter if you can't see it? Test every word. You do not have to keep the reader on the "proper path." The word path has the idea of "proper" built in.

What if we polled readers to determine the most influential writing books of all time? The winner, no doubt, would be The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. We'll get to those old boys later. Next on the list would be On Writing Well by William Zinsser, which has sold more than one million copies over the last thirty years. If I had to summarize Zinsser's advice in three words, it would be "Dump the clutter."

My appreciation for this book is marked by my affection for the man. I met him just after its publication and reunited with him by phone just before his death at the age of ninety-two. By then he was blind but still working with visiting writers in his Manhattan apartment and taking lessons from a poetry tutor. I can't get out of my head the thought of a ninety-year-old man taking poetry lessons. The idea inspires me and makes me laugh. It exemplifies the phrase lifetime learning. It reinforces my personal mission to try to learn something new about the craft every day. It makes me want to take trombone lessons. Maybe by ninety, I might join a jazz band.

To be honest, when I first met him in 1980 at a journalism conference in New York City, Zinsser already looked like an old man. The venue was a fancy ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria. We shared the stage with Ed Bliss, author of a fine book, Writing News for Broadcast. Zinsser was promoting his own new book, the thirtieth-anniversary edition of which boasts "More Than One Million Copies Sold."

I, at the time, was bookless.

Since that meeting, I have accounted for a dozen or more of those million copies of On Writing Well, volumes which have been read, borrowed, marked up, loaned out, spindled, and mutilated.

At the age of ninety, the old man was still kicking my asymptote.

When I last checked an online bookseller's lists, Zinsser held the number-1 spot for all books on authorship. My Writing Tools came in at number 4 (and number 16 in a digital version). My book ranked number 2,115 among all sold on Amazon; his was number 360. There have been many days when my book has been number 2, but even then I continue to eat the Z-man's dust.

(As I write these words, I realize that this chapter will get him even more sales. On the track of writing books, I am still being lapped by the ghost of Zinsser.)

Because of our friendly rivalry, I am tempted to declare Zinsser's book overrated, the way that the uber-achiever in our category, Strunk and White, is slammed by certain types of teachers and scholars. I want to drop-kick Zinsser and then body-slam the puny writing god, the way the Hulk does Loki in The Avengers. But I just can't do it.

I can't do it because of two stinkin' pages. Two pages.