I've killed my darlings thoroughly dead

You may have heard that no less than Allan Ginsberg (or Faulkner, or Eudora Welty, or Stephen King) said about writing, "Kill your Darlings". In actuality, a man named Arthur Quiller-Couch in 1915, and what he actually said was, "Murder Your Darlings". (Slate, 2017). By "darlings", he meant those cherished ideas that the writer put in the first draft of the book that don't improve plots, themes, or readability.

Yesterday, I thoroughly killed my darlings in Gaia's Hands, my first book and the one that just went through its latest round of rejections. Knowing what I know now about plot, theme, and readability, I proceeded to take my knife and do the following to the first third of the book:

1) Reduce the number of "first person characters" from four back to the original two. The story really belongs to Josh and Jeanne anyway.
2) Tweak out parts of the story that related to Eric and Annie's first person viewpoint. Many words were lost.
3) Put more emphasis on the escalating threat to Jeanne and her reasoning not to tell anyone. If there's a "main" character of the remaining two, it's Jeanne.

There's a lot of work to do, because I'm likely to lose 1/3 of this book cutting out some of the "fun" but uninformative scenes, and will have to fill in with things that better advance the story.


It's going to be impossible to show you the changes, because it's difficult to point out what's missing and why this hunk of deleted prose deserved to die. Instead, I will give you the first threat Jeanne receives, which seems really par for the course for an academic:

Jeanne arrived home to check her email, and noticed among the beginning of semester administrivia and invitations to write in dubious online journals an email from S. Troll. Figuring that some ag student was feeling his oats and wanted to troll her anonymously before classes started, she opened the email with an indulgent smile.

She realized she shouldn’t have as she read the terse missive: 

Dr. Beaumont,

There are ways of getting around problems. One of these is to eliminate the problem. My advice: lay low lest you stick out. 

Jeanne had had threats before. At a large regional university, students threatened to sue for grades, get their parents involved in an academic dishonesty charge, and one student even stood on her porch declaring that he would “do anything” to get a better grade. This was just a troll, just an idle threat — he hadn’t even threatened anything. 

The threat seemed so fake, so melodramatic, so empty.  At the same time — it was clearly a threat. And she felt a creeping dread curdle her stomach. She hadn’t felt that dread since her childhood, from an incident she had buried from memory.

She deleted the email with a sense of satisfaction.