The Curse of a Well Written Scene (Bite Sized Method)

It would be nice if a novel was just a collection of well written scenes. By numbers alone, I reckon I could pull that off.

What’s that?

Maybe three, four scenes per chapter across thirty chapters.

I’ve got piles of badly written scenes under my belt at this point, but if I fished through them, I’m confident I could bring back one hundred and twenty good ones.

It doesn’t work that way though.

They’ve got to be coherent scenes—which is obvious.

And they’ve got to serve the story— which is also obvious, but much more slippery to pull off than it sounds.

I’m sure even non-writers have heard the adage, “Kill your darlings,” which is shorthand for, “Be willing to ruthlessly cut your favourite scenes and sentences if they aren’t an essential part of the story.”

To the non-writer, this might be slightly baffling advice. “What do you mean, kill your darlings. If a particular scene doesn’t fit the project you’re working on, why would you write it in the first place?”

In an ideal world, you wouldn’t.

But when you wading into the fog of a long form piece of writing, things get a bit murky. You could begin with the clearest outline ever known to man, but once you begin working on the micro-level you inevitably start following the flow of the words directly at hand and this may or may not have any relation to the plan you so deliberately laid out for yourself at the outset.

I think it’s to do with the sheer volume of info you’re trying to hold in your head. You simply don’t have the band width to consider imagery, sentence structure, rhythm, dialogue, tension etc. and keep your eye strictly on how in-line you are keeping with the structural beats.

I’d go as far as saying the language would likely lose a good portion of its music if you could physically juggle all those different modes of thinking at once.

But maybe that’s just me romanticising what I do.

These limitations are a feature of the medium. They make it the most intoxicating and maddening endeavour you could choose to undertake. It leads you to end some writing sessions with something unrecognisable from what you set out to do.

But these very same scenes might just be the best words you’ve ever put to page.

Which is why the “Kill your darlings” adage is one every writer should have tattooed on the back of their fingers.

The scene that’s five thousand words longer than it needs to be isn’t hard to cut.

It’s the one that leaps off the page, lights up your mind and fires you up to take up figure skating that’s hard to get rid of.

Because you know that those words can only move you in this specific way if they’re located between all the scenes you included before them and if they lead into all the words that come after.

As a free standing piece, they simply don’t work. Without the correct priming all that emotional, passionate language that makes up this scene is just a collection of letters, grammar and syntax. They’re beautiful in context only. But unfortunately, for this piece of writing, they’re not needed.

So you’ve got to cut them out.

You’ve got to rob them of any life they might have had and by doing this, you’ve also got to rob any potential reader of the experience you had when you read them back for the first time.

There’s a tragedy in that.

But any writer worth their chops knows that if you don’t do it, the piece of writing it is weighing down will never be light enough to take off.

Which means, that alternate reality where everyone gets to enjoy that scene is a false one.

In this reality, the only reality you can exist in, that little lead gem of ego that you can’t stop stroking is keeping the entire thing grounded. It can’t fly on its own merit and it’s stealing from the wider project’s merit, therefore it’s not the glorious thing your pride drunk mind is telling you it is.

It’s a parasite. That’s the way you’ve got to look at it. It’s a thing that’s threatening to kill the host body it’s somehow worked its way into.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy it for a moment.

By all means, take a few seconds to admire what you did. Cherish the beauty of its temporary existence. You made that. It’s wonderful. Hopefully you’ll be able to achieve something as good as this again one day.

Then swing an axe into the fucking thing’s skull.

Die, Die, Die, my darling.

Try not to get bone chips on your shoes.