Murdering Darlings

HI gang,

Wow! Thanks so much for all of your incredibly kind words about the deleted scenes! That makes me feel good to know that you guys even like the leftovers!

A lot of you have asked to see the rest of that scene, but I probably won’t post it because it involves a CoveOps class assignment that I would really like to reuse in a future book, so…sorry…that one has got to stay in the vault, I’m afraid.

Others of you have asked why scenes get cut at all. Well, this is actually a pretty complicated question to answer.

The short answer is that you should only put the scenes in that serve the purpose of the BOOK.

In the trade, we call this “murdering your darlings.”

I have no idea who coined the phrase “murder your darlings”, but I love it because it sums up the feeling of looking at a character… a line… a piece of dialogue… a description… a subplot… SOMETHING that you just LOVE…

But it doesn’t work.

And so you have to kill it.

That’s what happened with the scene I posted yesterday. I love Cammie and Zach squaring off in that alley. I love the thought of how, last fall, Cammie saw the clean, fresh, pretty side of Roseville and this spring she’s seeing the place where they keep their garbage. I like A LOT about that scene…

But it doesn’t advance the overall plot. It takes us in a tangent away from the center of the story and, therefore, it had to go.

I think that an author’s job is as much about what you leave off the page as it is about what you put on it.

But maybe that’s just me.

later gators,
Ally