Blog topic suggested by Ticana Zhu
When we talk about “Killing your darlings” in fiction, what we mean is realizing that a particular phrase, paragraph, or scene is not, in fact, working with the story, no matter how much you love it. You have to cut it for the good of the story. It never gets easier.
Fortunately for your reading pleasure, I paste my darlings into “cut” files, so here are some to share with you!
Celeste stretched like a cat about to pounce. “I can’t believe I was starting to like you. Maybe it would be better to take you back without your knees.”
– cut from “The Silver Dame and the Box of Mystery.” 90% of my darlings are “snappy, vicious lines from killer robots” sometimes, more banter slows the whole thing down!
Fingers of the Queen. She wrote it down. What if all bees had a fourth dimensional component? What if all hives were a single creature humans saw as separate only because their perception was lacking? How could she test that hypothesis?
– cut from “Fourth Dimensional Tessellations of the American College Graduate” – I originally had this “fingers of the queen” extended metaphor for dimensional intersections, and that was the original story title. Cut most of it.
All the moons of Jupiter, with few exceptions, are named for the god’s lovers. “Lovers” is a generous way to look at it. Io had it worse than most.
– cut from “Unlikely Heroines of Callisto Station” in first draft, when it was Io. I had this long, poetic introduction about why I’d chosen Io as the setting because of her tortured geology and link with mental illness. Loved it. Didn’t work as an opening, and then I moved the station to Callisto anyway because I wanted people to walk outside and the radiation is too high near Io.
Ratana was the first terraformed world. Originally its orbit was closer to its old, red sun. Too close for comfort: the tidal forces of the sun had ripped Ratana’s crust and rubbed heavy materials together with metamorphic processes.
– cut from Galactic Hellcats – I had this nice 600-word section on the geology of Ratana. Only interesting to me.
“Believe in me,” I said. “I’m Senne. Yes… that’s right. Even now, you can’t help believing in me a little. I make bargains, isn’t that true? I’ll bring Illoe back to you. Heck, I’ll make him loving and true. He’s sexy, isn’t he?”
– cut from The Gods Awoke – I originally had this big confrontation scene with Hitra and Senne! Lots of snappy comebacks on both sides! But it ended up feeling too on-the-nose, too preachy. Replaced with much shorter, less straightforward scene.
Hitra said, “Have some respect. Have some dignity. No goddess would hold an innocent boy like bait.”
“Not true. Aren’t the scriptures full of me doing essentially that?”
Hitra thought about striking me, but she held her fist back. She relaxed a little. “Please,” she said. “You have a reputation, whether it is yours or not, but do you have character?”
Mot was kin. Most everyone he knew was kin, but they all worked for Master and Mistress, and they were not kin; they were humans, who were real smart, but small and skinny to make up for it. Somehow their small skinny smartness made them very powerful. Master and Mistress had a huge stone house, magic lights that didn’t burn or smoke, faucets that just gushed water when you turned them, and owned kin from all over and had other humans, even, to order the kin around for them.
– original first paragraph of “Mot the Stupid” – novel on submission. I was so in love with this opening that it took me 3 drafts to admit it had to go. The new opening is a scene instead of summary.
Margot’s paint survived the crash, though in the low, sunset light, she couldn’t quite tell if there was a scratch on the nose, or it was just a fluctuation in the stylized flames. Over her head, two giant slabs of dark rock lay against one another, like discarded books making a loose tent-shaped space. Underfoot a sickly, red stream of water meandered over flat mud on its way out, and down to the river. So, great, another cave.
– cut from Galactic Hellcats 2 – cut the whole scene because, yes, while I had this mad desire to use a cave I love – The Devil’s Icebox in Nelson’s Ledges – it was the third scene in the book in a cave. “You can do better, self,” I told myself, and put them by a river bank instead.
