Yes, Kill Your Darlings... But Toss Them Around a Bit First

It’s a good idea to see if they put up a fight.

Those words.

Those ideas.

If you are going to kill them anyway, kill them like a cat. Play with your food. Tug at them, toss them, switch them around. Perhaps the skull is worth keeping,

Or the pelt.

Because sometimes just having occasion to type the word “pelt” is enough.

I’ve been working on a play off and on for 25 years. I’ve gotten close, but not close enough. I’ve torn it apart. I’ve chewed on it. I’ve embarrassed myself for it. But even if, by some miracle, I finish it and nothing of its current form survives to the final draft, the journey I will have taken to write it will make it all the more rich when I do “get it right”. I am convinced that I need these missteps to make it into the thing I need it to be.

But it sucks.

It is demoralizing.

And at the moment, I have to admit, it is a worthless pile of shit sitting with its many iterations (and many formats) in a bloated digital file on my desktop.

But one day... one day it will be my Magnum Opus.

It better be, because I have been thinking about this dumbass play for more than half of my life!

The skull is good. The pelt is fine. The tail is beyond compare.

But the meat is rotten and the stomach has swollen to an unimaginable size (my cast of characters multiplying and metastasizing inside!!), and so I must dissect. I must know what went wrong with my beautiful monster.

I cant tell you, fellow writer, not to be despondent or frustrated or even angry. Those things are all part of the process. What I can tell you is to be curious. Be curious about your work and not judgmental. Curiosity will sustain you where judgement serves only to shut you down.

After all, a dismal failure is just a few rewrites away from genius. Be honest with and about yourself. Write daily. And eventually your skill will be up to the task.

Thats my story.

And I am sticking to it.