Kill Your Darlings
Okay, I didn’t exactly wake up with a chainsaw and a dream. If we're walking linearly through this story, I woke up with a plan to prune one of the bushes in our front yard. For several years, said bush had been attempting to swallow my house whole.
It held my children’s toys hostage. It growled at the mailman. The spiders within had set up a resort complete with time share opportunities.
The problem with trimming is that once you start, it’s hard to stop. And then my parents arrived with a bold suggestion, and my husband arrived with a chainsaw, and in the space of three hours, we’d found our porch again.
We will replant some less-aggressive shrubs (I’ll interview them closely about their expansion plans) but for now I’m really enjoying this lighter, brighter view.
(And if you’re wondering if this is a metaphor for tearing out the spider-infested paragraphs in your manuscript so you can find the heart of the story, it is.
What I’m Working On:
April kicked off with Easter festivities and the arrival of copy edits for The Second Greatest Thief.
This manuscript has gone through so many rounds of revisions by this point that the copy edits weren’t too painful. Most of the changes involved fixing minor inconsistencies and editing for clarity.
Final artwork also came in for the cover, and I cannot wait to share it with the world. I have it saved on my phone so I can admire it every once in a while. Here’s a sneak peek:
It’s really something, isn’t it. 🤣 In all seriousness, if you’ve followed along with my saga of finding an agent, landing a book deal, and then fighting my way through revisions, you understand how surreal it is to finally have a cover. Makes the whole thing feel real!
In other grand news, the idea that was cautiously circling the campfire of my thoughts finally crept out of the shadows. And once I saw its shape, all the pieces I’d been considering came together. I wrote up a two-page synopsis and sent it to my agent, and now I’m waiting to get her thoughts before I dive in!
What I’m Reading
(Perennial reminder that some of these have content warnings! Do your research!)
I wrapped up Time of the Child by Williams at the beginning of the month and absolutely loved it. The main complaint I’ve heard about this story is that it’s slow, to which I say, yes. It’s literary fiction at its most literary. You’re there for the vibes, not the plot. And I was a big fan of the vibes.
After that I read The Marriage Portrait by O’Farrell. Sometimes you have a confluence of sad historical fiction in your life, and the final sad historical fiction really breaks you, which is what happened with me here. O’Farrell’s prose is lovely, though.
Lastly, I read Magpie Murders by Horowitz. I am not a huge fan of murder mysteries. I was trying to parse out why that was last night, and I think it may have something to do with the aggressiveness of the plotting and the way characters are often held at arm’s length since everyone’s a suspect. This one, however, was really enjoyable.
A Writing Tip
Here is a question I received recently:
I was wondering how hard I, as a writer, should be trying when writing the message in my books? Because on the one hand, I want to write a book with a good message-I don't want to just write a book for the sake of the romance, or the plot… On the other hand, when you come up with a plot, you don't really want to spend ages shaping the plot and contriving it to fit the message you want to give, and you also definitely do NOT want to sound moralistic. Do you have any advice for navigating this?
This is a big question, and there are a lot of ways to tackle it, but if you’re already wary about being moralistic, then you’re in a good place. Fiction is meant to sway our loyalties and loves. Fiction is meant to make sense of the world. But fiction is at its worst when it tries to be propaganda.
Propaganda, lists of laws, commands, ordinances, etc. are speaking directly to the head. While there is a time to spell things out plainly, you have a much harder time penetrating the heart and swaying people to the good, true, and beautiful. And readers can tell when you’ve started with a moral and tried to dress it up in the clothes of a story. It looks like one of those Easter lamb cake fails.
Every story, even one that claims to be “just a romance” is saying something about the world. Morality isn’t something you have to add in later as if it’s an afterthought to the human experience. But a story is meant to be subtle, to sneak past the watchful dragons of our inhibitions, as Lewis says.
My advice is this: Focus first on finding the very best version of the story you want to tell, and telling it as truthfully as possible. Really lean into understanding how people work and crafting characters who feel and act real. Come up with a compelling premise, a thrilling What If, a rich and well-realized world. Work to be an expert storyteller. Write that first draft and then step back and see what themes naturally emerged from the story you wrote. You can always tease out and expand on those themes later, but they will feel naturally derived from the story rather than sprinkled on top.
I almost forgot: The Giveaway!
My copies of Fire and Stone, a short story anthology I contributed to, arrived, and I’m giving away one copy to one of you all!
Just click here and enter your info and I’ll announce a winner on Saturday.
That’s all for April. See you in May!
