Garrison Keillor (image: cwu.edu)
One of my heroes, Garrison Keillor had some more good and insightful things to say about writing, including the benefits of solitude and the malison of the ‘always-connected’ data-overloaded life:
The Internet and Google have their usefulness, God knows. I mean, how would we live without them? But you know, for young people with tremendously retentive minds, there’s too much upstairs. There’s too much data going in. If they didn’t have ADD before, they’ve got it now. They’re just bounced around like dragonflies on a pond.
I don’t mean to sound like an old codger, but I remember when I started out writing for the New Yorker I was living in a farmhouse in central Minnesota, because it was so cheap. It really removed a lot of the pressure of having to sell-sell-sell. I loved it there. I was desperately lonely, but that’s not a bad thing.
I was sitting in a room upstairs at a desk that was a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood across two used file cabinets, looking at an Underwood typewriter, and typing on yellow paper. It was a contemplative life that had great, deep pleasure. I wouldn’t know how to recover it today.This, for me, is how the world has changed, that a man sits at a desk in utter silence, and the phone line is simply the phone line. Somebody calls, and you don’t have to answer it. You sit in silence, and hours pass and you tap-tap-tap-tap at a typewriter. I will never, ever recover that life. It’s gone forever. And the college students I know will never know that life.
This is a rich exchange of views from a wonderful voice in all senses of the word … I recommend you read it in full on Tom Peters’ site (link below).
Some insightful comments about what experience teaches about writing/editing:
You do develop very quick reflexes of rejection and editing of your own stuff. When you’re young, you’re so fond of what you have created, because it takes a lot of effort to extrude this onto the page or onto the screen. You’re very fond of it, even if it’s wounded and you’re barely alive, you still have affection for it.
But as you get older, you learn how to throw it out without much thought, without much pity. You look at a piece that you’ve written, and you take those first three paragraphs, and you dump them. You just rip them out. Usually, that’s the part that needs to be thrown out, the big windup, the big introduction. The first page almost always can go. You learn to do that without regret. I edit myself much more quickly and mercilessly now than I ever could have 20, 30 years ago.
Lap it up … Tom Peters’ site.
My daughter attended a writing camp this last summer. When I spoke to her teacher at the end of the two weeks she told that my daughter showed great promise “but that she needed to murder her little darlings.” “What? What on earth are you talking about?” My daughter just rolled her eyes, “Dad.”
The teacher explained; that writers tend to hang onto little snippets and paragraphs of their work – paragraphs that have a certain zing – if you know what I mean – little darlings – bits that the writer can never give up or edit out. And when the little darling is compared to the main body of the work (when finished) it distracts from the work itself and in some cases has nothing whatsoever to do with the piece as a whole – and so it must be murdered! Killed! Destroyed!
The real problem, the teacher explained, is not so much keeping these little darlings but learning recognize them in the first place. And that the trick to good editing was not being afraid to dump them when needed.
I thought it was an interesting take on the writing because it may explain why internet forums are so popular. Short, concise little paragraphs are most effective – in other words – little darlings.
The Walk to Paradise Garden – W. Eugene Smith
“Murder your little darlings?”
Yes, I know this pitfall. We fall in love with our own prose, and resist the oh-so-important editing hatchetry.
I remember reading about another of my heroes, photographer W. Eugene Smith, who was a war photographer (WWII) before defining the photo-essay etc.
Smith recounted how he documented a dangerous beach landing, risking his life to get images of the soldiers invading under fire — and then developing the film and looking at the photos. He found himself imbuing the photos with more than their value as images because of the risk and effort it took to make them, NOT because of their worth as images. I think he said it took him quite a period of time and distance before he could bring himself to discard them as not-so-good-after-all, because of those ‘extraneous’ factors.
It can be like that with writing, in my experience.
Your mood, the atmosphere, your feelings as you write, the emotions you run through — all this can make you attached to your ‘little darlings’, that passage of which you’re fond … but if they don’t fit/assist the writing, out they must go. With regret sometimes.
I was encouraged by Keillor’s comment that it gets easier.
“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—-whole-heartedly–and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
Arthur Quiller-Couch
Thanks for sharing this quote Hannah. True.
I remember once weeping as I wrote a passage — feeling absolutely wretched about the emotional pain my character was enduring in my story, feeling her anguish and grief.
I didn’t regard it as particularly ‘fine writing’ but emotionally honest … Fortunately, the passage apparently communicated those feelings. It resonated with my readers, so it survived that draft of the manuscript.
(But plenty of my ‘clever’ writing gets spiked or culled, believe you me!)
Peter.