Distrust Your Darlings But Don't Delete Your Words Due to Bullies by Dean Gloster

 

            This month’s topic is editing—editing yourself and being edited. I have thoughts on both, which, these days, boils down to: be a brave, canny protagonist (in my view, good advice for life generally.)

            For editing yourself, the most commonly misunderstood piece of advice is “kill your darlings”—that is, delete that wonderful descriptions, joke, piece of dialogue, or stellar chunk of prose that you are inordinately proud of, but which stands out, and doesn’t quite serve your story.

            Seriously. The standard advice is to delete your very best stuff, when it doesn’t belong. As is often the case, the most memorable and compelling phrasing of this writing adage is by Stephen King: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even if it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

            For the most part, that’s good advice, if a little extreme. Mike Schur, a writer for The Simpsons, said in an interview that often they cut the very best joke in every episode, which never made it to the final script, because that joke didn’t serve the story—it didn’t move things forward.

 

            And the advice is--unfortunately--often necessary. We all resist prying these gems out of our manuscripts, even when our critique partners, writers’ groups, or even editors tell us they ought to go. Yes, it doesn’t really sound like something a 16-year-old girl would say. But it’s so good. Sigh. Cut it.

 

            But it’s advice that’s also overstated. Sometimes, those passages with brief flashes of playful lyricism are what makes the book a delight to read. And as we’re writing the story, we don’t always know what, at the end of the day, will really belong. And not every 16-year-old girl sounds the same.

            So, if you do have a gem, a darling, instead of just deleting it, carefully copy it into a separate document (I call mine snips) in case it needs to come back later, when you realize it really does serve the story. That does make it a little easier to pry out of the current draft.

            A more accurate and nuanced—but less pithy—rendition of this self-editing adage is: Be deeply suspicious of your darlings and (usually) relocate them—out of the manuscript.

 

            My advice about letting certain other people edit us at this moment is far less nuanced: Don’t let authoritarians and their enablers shut us up. Or cause us to silence ourselves.

            This week, Presidential candidate Donald Trump stomped all over various veterans’ graves at Arlington National Cemetery, with photographers in tow, to create digital campaign ads, in violation of both basic decency and federal law, 32 CFR 553.32(c), which provides “Memorial services and ceremonies…will not include partisan political activities.”

 

            In the process, a member of Trump’s entourage assaulted a woman who, in the course of her job at Arlington National Cemetery, tried to stop them. She promptly filed a complaint, summoning officers, but chose not to file charges for assault because “she was afraid that she was going to be retaliated against by Trump's supporters.” An entirely reasonable fear, it turns out, because in the meantime, Trump’s campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung had publicly accused her of having “a mental health episode” for doing her job—an attack so over-the-top that the U.S. Army responded with an unprecedented rebuke, that it was unfortunate that she “and her professionalism had been unfairly attacked.”

            I understand the worker’s reluctance to become a victim of retaliation. But I would urge all of us—especially writers—to be protagonists instead and to stand against this rising tide of pro-authoritarian bullying. Those of you who’ve read my posts here won’t be surprised to learn I am somewhat political online. (Understatement alert.) I have a Twitter account with 142,000 followers, and occasionally what I post there goes viral and triggers a response from the kind of people who would bully that cemetery worker, enough so that they (rarely, but still) send me soft-serve death threats in the replies:

 

            One tweet I sent recently:

 

            Brought the immediate response of the following one-star review of my YA novel Dessert First, worded so that I’d know exactly what had triggered it (and, presumably, so I would mute my future similar social media posts to avoid this kind of retaliation review):

 

            It was, in fairness, a credible parody of my tweet. I reported it to Amazon anyway, and—while it’s still up as the latest review of my book—it apparently isn’t being used anymore to calculated the average number of stars for customer reviews. And, dear readers, I have not muted--and will not mute--my social media posts. 

            So yes—if we write books the are inclusive, diverse, kind, honest, authentic, and open-hearted enough to touch readers and make them feel seen, we may suffer consequences like having our books banned in parts of Texas, Florida, and Missouri. Or getting nasty reviews. But I think that means we should write more of those books, because our readers need more of them. And we should also use our voices to speak out in favor of democracy and decency, while we can. Many of us have platforms on social media, and, as writers for young people, our platforms should be used for more than ritual adverb sacrifices.

 

            There may come a time when, as writers, we are silenced. But we should not silence ourselves before that curtain falls. And if we speak out enough now, we might even prevent that from happening. That’s my choice, anyway.

 

            Be brave, friends. Be a protagonist. And good luck to us all. 

 

Margaret Atwood, demonstrating that it’s difficult to burn the fireproof version of her book

 Dean Gloster is a former stand-up comedian and a former law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court. His debut YA novel DESSERT FIRST is out from Merit Press/Simon Pulse. School Library Journal called it “a sweet, sorrowful, and simply divine debut novel that teens will be sinking their teeth into. This wonderful story…will be a hit with fans of John Green's The Fault in Our Stars and Jesse Andrews's Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.” His YA short story “Death’s Adopted Daughter” is in the anthology Spoon Knife 6: Rest Stop from Autonomous Press, and his YA short story, “Proof of the Existence of Dog” is now out in the anthology Spoon Knife 7: Transitions. He is at work on two more YA novels, one in draft and the other in revision, and makes periodic anti-authoritarian ramblings on the app formerly known as Twitter, at @deangloster.