When Not to Kill Your Darlings: Exposing Another Awful Writing “Rule”

By Dario Ciriello

Part of the How They Do It Series

JH: Kill Your Darlings has been a writing-advice staple forever, but there are times when we shouldn't follow that advice. Dario Ciriello is back this month with his thoughts on the topic.

Recently, In the course of beta reading a long Epic Fantasy novel by a very skilled and highly-acclaimed author friend, I came across a single major issue: a subplot and its characters, fascinating and well-written and full of wonder and wisdom, had grown so large it threatened to hijack and overshadow the core narrative.

I could see three main ways to fix this. These were: (i) pare that entire subplot down by at least a third; (ii) break it up further still with interspersed scenes happening elsewhere; (iii) reassure the reader, using brazen foreshadowing, and more than once, that all the events taking place in this subplot were relevant to and would tie back into the core plot.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com