Gary Inbinder's Blog - Posts Tagged "style"
Kill Our Darlings?
The catch-phrase "Kill your darlings" entered the critic's lexicon a while back and its popularity seems to have increased since the release of the film "Kill Your Darlings" about the beat generation poets and writers. However, there seems to be some confusion about the source of the phrase and its original meaning. According to my research, it first appeared as "Murder your darlings" in a series of Cambridge University lectures given about a century ago by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.
Sir Arthur was a well-regarded British man of letters who sometimes wrote under the pen name Q. He was prolific and his literary career spanned several decades, from the 1880's to the 1930's. "Murder your darlings" is taken from his lecture on Style:
"To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is not; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’
Notice that Sir Arthur was not damning all ornamental prose, just the "extraneous" or superfluous ornament, what might be called ornament for ornament's sake. Perhaps the professional letter-writer in his example was paid by the word. I can imagine him writing ostentatious flattery such as "thine eyes shimmer like twin limpid pools of liquid lapis lazuli." However, if the letter-writer had not penned such flowery stuff the young man, and the object of his affection, might have felt cheated. Under the circumstances, would such ornament be "extraneous"? After all, the purpose of the letter would be to "convey" the young man's passion to the young woman in a culturally acceptable manner. "I got the hots for you, baby" would have been direct, but highly inappropriate.
Practically speaking, the presumably perfumed prose of the Persian letter-writer would be more suitable to the particular time, place and manner than the tough, lean style of Mickey Spillane or Elmore Leonard.
Before writers accede to demands that we "kill our darlings", we should consider the suitability of our language to the genre, the story, the characters—the literary gestalt. What's right for a hard-boiled thriller could be wrong for an historical romance, and vice versa.
I would also distinguish between Sir Arthur's original use of the word "murder" and the "kill" into which it has morphed. Strictly speaking, murder is an unjustified homicide. Killing can be justified when done in self-defense or defense of others. "Killing darlings," in literary terms, can be justified in the editing of extraneous ornament. However, taking a blue pencil to all ornament, much of Shakespeare for example, because the editor or critic prefers a terse style to the Bard's poetic effusiveness could be akin to an act of "murder."
Sir Arthur was a well-regarded British man of letters who sometimes wrote under the pen name Q. He was prolific and his literary career spanned several decades, from the 1880's to the 1930's. "Murder your darlings" is taken from his lecture on Style:
"To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is not; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’
Notice that Sir Arthur was not damning all ornamental prose, just the "extraneous" or superfluous ornament, what might be called ornament for ornament's sake. Perhaps the professional letter-writer in his example was paid by the word. I can imagine him writing ostentatious flattery such as "thine eyes shimmer like twin limpid pools of liquid lapis lazuli." However, if the letter-writer had not penned such flowery stuff the young man, and the object of his affection, might have felt cheated. Under the circumstances, would such ornament be "extraneous"? After all, the purpose of the letter would be to "convey" the young man's passion to the young woman in a culturally acceptable manner. "I got the hots for you, baby" would have been direct, but highly inappropriate.
Practically speaking, the presumably perfumed prose of the Persian letter-writer would be more suitable to the particular time, place and manner than the tough, lean style of Mickey Spillane or Elmore Leonard.
Before writers accede to demands that we "kill our darlings", we should consider the suitability of our language to the genre, the story, the characters—the literary gestalt. What's right for a hard-boiled thriller could be wrong for an historical romance, and vice versa.
I would also distinguish between Sir Arthur's original use of the word "murder" and the "kill" into which it has morphed. Strictly speaking, murder is an unjustified homicide. Killing can be justified when done in self-defense or defense of others. "Killing darlings," in literary terms, can be justified in the editing of extraneous ornament. However, taking a blue pencil to all ornament, much of Shakespeare for example, because the editor or critic prefers a terse style to the Bard's poetic effusiveness could be akin to an act of "murder."
