Kill your Darlings

Apparently Ernest Hemingway once offered up the advice for young writers, that in order to edit a piece to what it truly needs to be, you have to 'kill your darlings.' When I was a freshman at NYU in a creative non-fiction class, this quote came up frequently, and it was usually applied to poetic flourishes in which the author flexed his or her creative muscles to an unusually strong degree, but in doing so, offered little to moving the story forward. While we can all appreciate a nice paragraph, if it plays with language, leaving the plot untouched, there's a good chance it has no business in that particular story.

At the moment, I'm unemployed and focusing all my time and attention on editing my novel 18, Alien Nations that I wrote when I was 18, and that's the issue that comes up the most. I know the novel is too long, it rambles, and it has no real discernible plot. And yet I have the hardest time bringing myself to cut out sections that I know don't belong, because, frankly, I'm surprised and elated to discover that I had the ability to write as well as I did 5 years ago. That's not to say that the whole thing is well written - not by a long shot - but there are glimmering moments that give me comfort and encouragement. The quote below opens up the second to last chapter of the book, and while I think it's a lovely little description of rain, I know it ultimately has nothing to offer the story at large (and when you need to cut 100 pages out of a 345 page long book, the story at large will always win out in the end). As consolation, I choose to print it here as a prose poem instead of letting it inflate an already engorged novel.

"Way up Boulder Canyon, high above Denver, where the snow falls on misty valley days, I felt tropical rain in October. Laying on a futon, resting from the world, the hypnotics of the clock droned on and the sun passed by overhead, shroud, rainclouds thick and intransible. Drip tock tip drop. Tin roof above, glaring hot furnace steaming my skin, breath creeping out like whipped cream, the sky opened up and little marbles of bells jingled and jumped for hours, so soft and hard like forbidden sex, soothing my mind, warming my spirit. Tropical rain."