Killing My Darlings – Good scenes that have to go.

There’s been heaps of deep breaths, sighs, and walking away from my desk this week as I work through the Australia Writers’ Centre's Cut, Shape, Polish course and learn how to edit my first draft manuscript.

Now that I've completed the structural overview for my second draft of The Catalina, a heap of lessons from previous creative writing courses have come flooding back.

One is the term ‘Killing Your Darlings.’ It was constantly repeated by my tutors. I understood the theory—cut the scenes that don't serve the story. What I didn't understand was how attached I'd become to some of them.

All I thought was:

How hard can it be?

Once again, as a rookie first draft manuscript writer, I was so wrong – it’s bloody hard.

But this week hasn’t only been about cutting words and scenes. It’s also been about making some hard decisions for the story—including one involving a character I never expected to lose.

It’s all been quite emotional—doubt, mild-anger, regret, relief and hope—all mixed up in the voice screaming in my head ‘You don’t know what you’re doing!’

I’m only up to chapter nine of forty-six chapters in my manuscript but I’ve already cut just on 2,000 words. If this rate of cutting continues, and I’ve got no idea if it will or won’t, the manuscript will lose almost 12,000 words. But as a first-time author trying to get a publishing deal, at the moment, I'm going to need to cut around 20,000 in total. That's daunting.

You might be wondering why all this is a big deal?

Well, before I got into this creative writing phase of my life, wordcount didn’t seem like it meant much at all … now I’ve learned most writers are obsessed by it and now, me too.

As I shift from writing this week’s behind the scenes journal (and obsessing over how many words I should and shouldn’t write), and back to the next chapter in the manuscript, what I know is I’ll keep Killing My Darlings, painful as it is, because my tutors have taught me it's more than just part of the second-draft process—it's essential if I want the manuscript to reach the standard a publisher would expect.

So far, it's not only about cutting words, scenes and even chapters, it's also meant making one particularly difficult decision about a character's future. It wasn't a decision I expected to make when I started writing this manuscript.

Next week, I'll share why I made it and how I think it strengthens the story.

Until then, my very best to you.

If you’d like to follow my writing journey, you can find me on my Facebook Author Page.