Kill Your Darlings
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings,” was the advice Stephen King gave in his novel On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. In his talk about what makes for an effective story on the radio, Ira Glass gives a very smilar piece of advice. He says, “Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.” What he means to say, is that it’s hard to just get rid of something you spent so much time working on. But the truth of the matter is, most of the time you’re not going to succeed–you aren’t always likely to end up the the story you imagined. Instead of holding onto it and trying to salvage something good from the mess, it’s better to kill it and move on. And “enjoy the killing,” says Ira, because something better will grow out of it.
I think this is a great piece of advice because it’s something I struggle with often in my writing. When you create something, you put your time, your effort, your thoughts into it. It’s like putting a piece of yourself out there. Killing it sometimes makes it seem like all your hard work went to waste, when in fact, it just helps you move on to something better. I think the same concept can definitely be applied to the Audio Essay. Even though I thought I had it all thought out, I realized that there are actually a lot of challenges that I may come across with the topic I chose and I may just have to kill parts of my proposal off in order to create a better product.
One response so far
I also have trouble getting rid of certain parts of an essay. Many times I want to tell my audience about a certain story or fact, but I simply cannot make it fit. This is a struggle that I tried to overcome in my last essay. I think you have to look at your overall theme or argument in your essay and ask yourself if a certain anecdote helps build or further your essay’s purpose.