The 12 Days of Liz: Day 1: Kill Your Darlings

I’m in a full-court press on Liz while doing about twenty other things, but I have not failed to notice that the last three posts here were announcements. I don’t have time to do decent, thoughtful posts right now, but I can do a 12 Days of Liz and dump whatever I happen to trip over that day on you. Today it’s about cutting lines you love.

This is in the first scene in Liz:

The cop wasn’t anybody I knew, which meant I wouldn’t get any “Well, here’s trouble back in town” crap, although he did fit the general description of “Burney Guy”: a good old Midwestern boy with more chin than forehead, eyes narrowed in suspicion over a nose that had been broken at least once. If you’d asked me to put money on it, I’d have bet that his knees were gone, too. We like our high school football rough in Ohio, so we tend to maim our young.

I smiled up at him, cheerful and innocent as all hell.

He didn’t smile back, but he didn’t look particularly upset, either.

I really love that football line, but it completely slows the action and puts too much space between seeing the cop (that would be Vince) and her reaction (the smile). So that line that I love? It has to go. Faulkner said, “Kill your darlings” and he meant to get rid of anything you especially love that’s in the story pretty much because you especially love it and not because it’s necessary. Which brings us to my favorite bit of Strunk and White:

Omit needless words.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Along with Elmore Leonard’s “I try to leave out the parts people skip,” this is the best writing advice I know.

So that section now reads:

The cop wasn’t anybody I knew, which meant I wouldn’t get any “Well, here’s trouble back in town” crap, although he did fit the general description of “Burney Guy”: a good old Midwestern boy with more chin than forehead, eyes narrowed in suspicion over a nose that had been broken at least once.

I smiled up at him, cheerful and innocent as all hell.

He didn’t smile back, but he didn’t look particularly upset, either.

Story first. Always, always story first.