Writing: One Step Forward

One of the classic “everyone has heard it” pieces of writing advice is “kill your darlings.” But what does this actually mean?

Most often, the advice applies to individual pieces of dialogue or description. That absolutely delicious awe-inspiring, character-conveying sentence—at least, it seems that way at the moment of its creation—can gradually fall out of sync with the larger story, but the author becomes too enamored of it to accept that it no longer belongs in the emerging whole. “Kill your darling,” a fellow writer may cry, and even then, the author struggles to accept that those magical words no longer have a space on the page and may get in the way of what its creator wants to convey.

The same can be said of entire paragraphs, even characters. I remember a cartoon I saw somewhere on social media where two fictional friends met by chance and were trading complaints about their creator. Their names changed, and changed again; one friend had been written out of the story altogether; genders shifted one way or another. What made it funny was that anyone who writes fiction does this, and those choices, too, are a form of killing one’s darlings for the sake of the novel as a whole.

Just this week, for example, I accepted an unwelcome but ultimately freeing truth about my latest, least-developed fictional project, Catch a Falling Star. (Although Song of the Silk Weaver needs just one thorough re-read and Song of the Sleuth requires at most two chapters to reach the stage of a messy but roughly formed first draft, I’ve had so many editing projects that it’s easier to focus on the book that’s least developed, where a half hour’s research here or tweaking a single scene there fits more neatly into the gaps.) Although I’d made it into chapter 3, mostly as a way of finding the main character, I realized the day before last that everything I’ve written up to now is backstory.

Now, backstory has its own reason for being. The life a character lived before the novel opens forms that person just as it does the people we meet every day. The choices we make, the things we react to, the assumptions we hold about the world, our sense of safety or competence, our emotional maturity—all these traits and many more come out of our experience before the novel begins, most often in childhood.

But as I wrote a few months back in “Writing: Beginnings and Endings,” a novel doesn’t begin at the moment the main character comes into the world. It starts right before the event that shoves the hero, willy-nilly, along the path to growth and development, a path that almost by definition forces the character to change, to leave those familiar (if not always comfortable) everyday patterns behind and confront a new way of being.

Backstory is important, but there’s a reason it appears on the page only in the form of memories that encourage or, more often, constrict the heroine’s responses. It explains where a protagonist has been and defines the tools available to solve current problems, but in itself it solves nothing. More often, it gets in the way of resolution; it mires the character in old habits and keeps that person from trying the new, scary method that ultimately leads to success.

How did I realize I was writing backstory, not story? As I became more comfortable with my heroine—who she is, where she comes from, how old she is at different points in the novel, why she reacts as she does, what could possibly motivate her to take the steps she does—I began to imagine her in discussion with other important characters in the novel.

At that point, I realized she would have to repeat all the stuff the reader would already know in order to fit into her new trajectory. And if there is one thing readers don’t want, it’s to watch something develop in real time, then listen to the characters endlessly telling each other stuff the reader already knows. Once in a while as a reminder, sure. But over and over, no way. Seemed like a classic definition of backstory to me.

So I bit the bullet. I saved a version of the file with the scenes that I had lovingly worked on for weeks, going through three if not four variations of the story before getting to chapter 3. Then I nuked everything but the first two paragraphs and the author’s note and started from scratch. I know much more about my protagonist now, and I’m sure I will continue to learn about her—including her backstory—as I start over.

But one thing I will not do is force the reader to inhale all that backstory, unless some small portion of it earns a place in my character’s present—even though that present, ironically, lies almost five hundred years in our past.

Images: Woman contemplating a notebook purchased from Clipart.com, no. 109492886; Mughal battle scene (1525) public domain via Wikimedia Commons.