You can’t get far on the path to becoming a writer without being told to “kill your darlings.” There is value in the well-worn advice. It points to an author’s attachment to a character, sentence, or image, making it difficult to cut, even if it doesn’t serve the poem or story. Stephen King popularized the adage in his book On Writing: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
I don’t exactly disagree with this advice, but “kill” is the wrong word. The delete button is too blunt an instrument for something we wrote that we love for a reason: it’s catching, beautiful, ironic, or powerful. Something tells us we created something valuable, and that something is usually right. Then, we waste valuable time himming and hawing and glancing sideways at the delete button, because writers aren’t killers by nature, even when Stephen King tells them they are.
The right word is “relocate.” I tell my writing students to gently move their darlings to a comfortable, well-lit folder on their desks or computers. The benefit of this distinction is twofold: first, it becomes easier to remove the darling from the poem it doesn’t belong in, knowing we’re not losing it forever. Second, when the day comes that finds the writer at the table with nothing, as it always does sooner or later, we can suddenly remember our ace in the hole: the darlings folder. In there, the discarded gems shine even brighter, without context or competition. The image that didn’t fit in the story or poem it first appeared in could be the seed of a new thing all its own.
This is the origin story of my prose poem, “Fingertips to Her Shoulders Like Wings in Her Sleep,” which was recently published in A Story in 100 Words. The beauty of this darling haunted me, but there was nothing else I liked in the poem it was living in. Eventually, I gave up and relocated the image to the Darlings folder.
No less than two years later, when inspiration was thin one day, I pasted it into its own document. I looked deeply into it. Perhaps the woman is dreaming of what she might become, I thought. What might be holding her back? The image of wings stretched naturally into metaphors involving birds and flight, and I had a prose poem I was proud of in front of me in twenty minutes. Well, two years and twenty minutes, to be exact, but who’s counting?
Read my darling poem in A Story in 100 Words: “Fingertips to Her Shoulders Like Wings in Her Sleep”
