Murder Your Darlings
An excellent post at Poynter offers excellent advice (so long as that advice is followed with prudence).
It goes like this:
An author writes a piece and then edits it. Part of the editing process is to “Murder Your Darlings” — get rid of phrases that struck you as brilliant when they first came to mind, but which don’t work well. Even in the case when a phrase seems just too good to pass up, don’t distort good copy around it to make it work. Better to save it for a rainy day than throw it away.
The phrase is born in Arthur Quiller-Couch’s book On the Art of Writing: “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.”
The technique is for use with stories, and that’s precisely why attorneys should know of it, because so much of what so many of them do includes writing stories; e.g., “Defendant emerged from the conference room and walked briskly toward the elevator, about 50 feet away. Halfway there, Defendant deliberately knocked Plaintiff to his feet, causing his head to strike the metal box and, hence, his death.”
James Patrick Kelly offers this fine essay describing the technique.
Try it. And ask yourself, “which story is more likely to be accepted by judge and jury: the well-written one, or the longer, flowery one?”
14 January 2008 at 9:33
[...] Still, whether they’re writing client alerts or novels, amicus briefs or sales pitches, the best writers are those who are willing to murder their darlings. [...]