Murder Your Darlings!

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

If you think proofreading your novel, changing a sentence here and there, counts as your next draft, it isn't. A popular phrase you'll hear in writers conferences and workshops is "Murder your darlings!" I used to be afraid of deleting a well-written sentence, but if it no longer fits the book, kill it. You can paste it into a separate Word file if you insist, to be used in something else later on.

This is a short video of Harry Crews on the subject of Murder Your Darlings. He says that "The real artist with no tear in his eye and no sadness in his heart puts the pages in the fire and [writes] it again."

Personally, I find it very refreshing to start over. It took a lot of practice and knuckle-whitening moments to get to that stage, but it was worth it. You have to be willing to sacrifice any sentence, any scene in the whole book for the sake of the book. I have written more scenes of Riff that didn't end up in the book than scenes that did. There's over a book's worth of words that got deleted. From draft 1 to 2, I literally rewrote half the book--started from scratch. In the 3rd draft, there is very little left of the original story. It's better for it.

Here are some suggestions if you don't know where to begin:

1. Go back through what you've written and write down the image or emotion that is important in that scene.

2. Make a short list of scene goals. Basically, why does this scene need to be in the book?

3. If you insist that you still have some really great sentences in the old draft, highlight them to make sure you incorporate them later, but limit yourself otherwise you'll end up rewriting everything you just wrote word for word.

4. Rewrite the scene with no intent on ending up in the same place as your previous draft. Write it as though you're writing it for the first time. Explore alternative events. Make reference only to the image/emotion you wrote down and the scene goals. You can add in good lines later. Don't let them hinder your creativity.