Serving the Story

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have just murdered, torn apart and dismembered, the most perfect chapter I’ve ever written. I cannot tell you how marvelous the details were, the emotion, the wild energy, the use of metaphor. I read it at Lit Salon, I showed it to my reader posse – everyone seemed to agree that it was an amazing opening chapter.

But you know what? It didn’t serve the story. Though I may salvage very tiny bits and pieces of it, the story demands another angle, a different kind of energy, a different chronology. It’s called killing your darlings, and all writers at some point do it because the story is what’s important, not our flashy writing.

Then I went up to the mountains and stared at my blank computer screen for awhile wondering what would take the place of my flashy, marvelous chapter, and I wrote a lot really soggy, flat stuff. But then eventually, as always happens, if I don’t run away and give up in despair, new words started to come and I was rewriting the opening of my book. You’d think we’d learn this and be done with it, the whole messy, flailing around process. But you never come to the end of learning how to write a story. That’s what makes being a writer so exciting and endlessly interesting.

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