It’s become a cliché, to kill your darlings when writing. There’s even a literary journal by the same name. But no matter how often I hear the injunction, it doesn’t make it any easier to do the deed.
I’m up to what I think of as the second practice writing. It’s the writing after the first practice writing, and before – long before – the real writing which will occur one magic day in the future when a glorious, effortless stream will commence pouring. So long as it’s practice writing I can just about manage to sit down in the meantime and do the daily target of words I’ve set myself.
The problem with the second practice writing is the high proportion of darlings, the felicitous words that pop from nowhere, the delectable turns of phrase, the evidence of my subtlety. Every one of them leads me on a frolic that can last for days, though it’s a rather limp frolic, overcast as it is with the feeling of defiant deferral.
It’s not that they’re wrong, the darlings; that’s the problem. It’s that they’re almost right. And they can flourish in all kinds of situations, not only writing. Take the world’s most famous knitter, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, aka the Yarn Harlot. She’s just held her nose and kept on knitting to an advanced stage of a very intricate baby blanket, even though she knew there was a niggle at about the six inch mark. She’d checked and re-checked, and it wasn’t an error. An error would have been easy to face. No, it was just something not quite right, a “line”, she said, that had appeared in the work. Eventually, of course, she had to face it, and come up with a solution.
That’s how it is with darlings. You can run but they always, always, catch you up.
The best words I’ve ever heard on the matter come from W. G. Sebald who also links the challenges of writing with the making of fabric. That a writer of such grace and power knew the problem intimately gives me comfort. Maybe you too.
That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.*
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* W G Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
