Writing Advice: Murder your Darlings - Tray

 I: Introductory Introduction: 

The writing book about writing books: Murder your Darlings, and other gentle writing advice from Aristotle to Zinsser, is a top contender for the brim-full genre. Packed with advice and the author Roy Peter Clark’s personal experiences, it’s a thunderbolt of guidance to help you improve your craft. This blog post will be taking a few points from the book, as copy pasting the entirety of it wouldn’t be practical, and expanding on those advice points. 

II: Cutting Clutter

Murder your darlings. Erase your friends. Scratch out your mother. That’s what Clark and many authors did to their writings; beat it down, until everything unnecessary was demolished.

But how do you determine if a sentence is clutter? Understanding the definition that the author is using is crucial for that. 

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CLUTTER 

/CL-UTT-ER/

Noun, (writing context)

All the stuff that doesn’t pertain to the ideas of the text.

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Let’s take a look at an example. 

“The man’s eye’s almost-but-not-quite black pupils dilated; the most miniscule amount, comparable to one tenth of a millimeter, utterly shining. His eyelids quivered on the area of the blue orbs, ready to succumb to the force of gravity, before they fell, hitting the base of his eye like a baseball player hitting a home run for an indecipherably tiny millisecond, before popping back up, unperturbed. His eyes were now washed anew. New moisture glistened in them, and the threat of irritated eyes had once more been defeated.”

Now let’s cut the clutter. 

“He blinked.” 

Some styles will allow you to forgo the “he”, or even the “blinked”. 

I’m not going to say which excerpt is better, as that is for the reader to decide, but imagine if every movement in a novel was described like the former example. Unless the purpose of the text was to stress the little movements, the book would be almost unreadable. However, if this was the hardest the man has ever blinked, or the blink was somehow the climax of the story, perhaps the former would have been acceptable, though some would argue the latter has more of an emotional punch. 

If you can remove it and the idea of the text stays the same or clears up, then the words should be deleted. The idea the author stresses throughout this section is that in order to improve your writing, you must be willing to erase your hours of hard work in order to get better. Mass genocide isn’t the only option, though. You could always save the trashed writing and use it for a different project. 

III: Sentence Sentience 

Writing advice normally isn’t very specific, which can be frustrating. Clark kicks vagueness away by teaching some neat techniques that’ll spice up your writing. 

Putting the most important word at the end of the sentence emphasizes that subject. The same can be done with a sentence in a paragraph, or a page in a book. Clark uses Michelle Obama’s quote as an example: "I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves." He argues that the sentence is more dramatic than “Slaves built the house I wake up in.” 

Speaking of sentence emphasization, length can give different impressions on the reader’s mind. Short sentences are the truth. Long sentences flow, build up, and give more and more information that drips into the reader's mind. Medium sentences meet in the middle, filling in gaps. Try not to do too much of one thing. Too many short sentences are turbulent. Jarring. Mechanical. Roadblocks. Long sentences aren’t as irritating, but too many and the reader will notice the inflexible structure. Sentence variety is good unless you’re purposely going for an effect. 

IV: Crafty Characters 

Characters often shape a story’s plot, and it’s important to distinguish between flat and round characters. Flat characters are embodiments of one trait, and at its worst, a stereotype. Round characters are representative of real humans. Despite round characters showing more complexity, flat characters can also be useful, entertaining, and relatable. 

2D characters are often used for comedy or are minor characters in stories. They’re rarely supporting or main characters because having someone so flat always in the reader’s view could kill the story, but some authors pull it off. Christmas Carol is full of flat characters, but is popular despite it featuring Scrooge, his personality being “grump”, as the main character. 

To further understand this concept, let’s make a 2d character of our own. 

Take the asian stereotype. A ten year old boy who has no interest in anything other than piano, violin, math, and potentially karate. 

How do we make this stereotype round? 

The reason the character described in the former paragraph is flat is because he has nothing other than his “asianness”, which can be fixed by giving him a personality. Pet peeves, reasons for his behavior, things that complicate or defy the stereotype. Let’s make him scared of the dentist, overly fond of Mcdonalds, and a quick decision maker. See? Already a circle. 

Something that can tell much about a character are their actions. Actions shape character, and character shapes actions. The personality of a character doesn’t really matter until they manage to make a decision, and that decision will further shape the personality of them. Clark writes that a telling trait of a round character is that they can make unexpected decisions and still stay true to their personality. If their decisions are always anticipated, or their decisions are unexpected but don't make sense, then they’re flat. 

V: Woke Writing 

Consider a zero draft before you write your first draft. A zero draft is the vital organs of a first draft. Ideas don’t have to come out in perfect, fully fledged sentences. Make sure to get the idea down. Fragments of thoughts, write fast, don’t edit, and then in the first draft you can make everything comprehensible. When you have your first or zero draft down, think about a premise that summarizes the story in 5-6 words. 

“Strong love defies even death.” 

“Excessive greed follows wealth.” 

“Justice doesn’t always win.” 

If you have a good premise, your story will be memorable. Memorable stories are the best stories. 

In order to develop good stories you need to write daily until you can write at will. This one is for the author wannabes out there, but even if you just want to casually improve your writing, this can be a helpful exercise. Write on a schedule in a comfortable place. Even if you don’t want to write, try to, because it helps with getting over the wall of procrastination and could probably help you finish essays quickly. 

Something you can develop while writing daily or weekly is your voice. Your voice is you, or how you choose to express yourself through writing. Examine your writing and see what words come to mind when you read it. Neutral? Tentative? Vulgar? You could choose to adjust your voice for every different piece you write, develop a distinct writing style that everyone recognizes, or just not care and write however you want. 

VI: Conclusive Conclusion: 

I rated the book a 6.5 out of 10. 5 points for the advice and 1.5 for everything else. Some of the stories told were interesting, but after a while, it got dull. If you want to get the best meat from the carcass, flip to the end of each section and read the tldr. The book might have been better if the author took those and made it a short flip through.

Even though the anecdotes were not particularly interesting, I do admit that the advice is top notch. I don’t remember much from the book itself (even though I read it two days ago) but hopefully my subconscious mopped up the knowledge fluids. I could see it as a good book of thumb to keep with you as you write your next essay/novel, though, so overall it’s pretty useful.