My wife writes a little, but reads a lot. One time she went back and re-read something she had written years ago, and came away thinking "I hate this type of writing! It thinks it's so damn smart!". Her takeaway was this: if you're in love with the way you phrased something, rewrite it.
Hey goal is to write a story with plot. Real characters. Arcs. As soon as she finds herself wasting time rolling sentences around her mouth, like toffee, with big fancy words, she is directly hurting the readers' flow. Sometimes it's nice to leave one or two, but in general you shouldn't try to be in love with every sentence you've written. But every sentence should move the story forward. Just tell the damn story. Because when you come back to your writing years later, it's those very stylish, witty, fancy phrases that will embarrass you.
I think this speaks to a common misunderstanding of ‘literary’ fiction vs. ‘genre’ fiction - the former is typically more character- or idea-driven, while the latter is story/plot driven.
I’m not making the argument that one is intrinsically ‘better’ than the other; rather that their goals are different.
I do tend to agree with the idea that you shouldn’t be ‘afraid to kill your darlings’ (cite needed). Flannery O’Connor was once asked whether she thought that MFA programs killed too many aspiring authors. Her reply was that she thought they didn’t kill enough of them.
> I do tend to agree with the idea that you shouldn’t be ‘afraid to kill your darlings’ (cite needed). Flannery O’Connor was once asked whether she thought that MFA programs killed too many aspiring authors. Her reply was that she thought they didn’t kill enough of them.
It's funny to me that that line by O’Connor is both good writing and good business, at least in that it reduces competition with their own works. Furthermore, making quotable quips is the best kind of publicity for your writing you can do for free as an author. I wonder how many MFA programs are so explicit about the dismal prospects of writing as a livelihood or career, not that it was ever much better in the past. Arguably, it's easier than ever to get paid as an independent writer, but that doesn't make it any easier to make a decent living exclusively from one's published output.
> A piece of advice to prospective authors that they must kill their “darlings”, i.e. suppress overuse of their favorite expressions, tropes, characters, etc. Often attributed to William Faulkner (1897–1962), but already expressed earlier by Arthur Quiller-Couch (murder one's darlings); more recently popularized by Stephen King.
Having said that, I don't think it's good policy to remove everything, down to the point where you have: Mary came in. She saw John. John saw her too. Mary said "Well, what now?". John replied "I don't know"
Sometimes it's hilarious to describe the body language and internal monologue of a particularly awful character, and sometimes it feels pushed.
Thank god I'm not a writer. It's hard enough writing something that passes a linters / CI tests and works in production without adding "how does it make you feel to read it?". Code is written to run on machines. That's is function. But it should be written to be understandable and maintainable to humans as a secondary goal. But taking a human, making them laugh, making them cry and changing their life? I wouldn't know where to start.
But oddly, I re-read my own post and now I have a strange desire to find out what happened between Mary and John.
2026: Ground breaking novel by raffraffraff, "The thing that occurred between John and Mary"
