by Nicholas Wolf
In this blog post, I will explore and deconstruct the aphorism “kill your darlings”. This aphorism is commonly directed at new and inexperienced writers. In many cases, the “darling” is commonly a sentence or paragraph which has invaded the writer’s mind like an earworm. This orthographic possession occurs because writers interpret the other aphorism “show, don’t tell” too literally. They take “show, don’t tell” to mean that they must describe everything that happens with paragraphs upon paragraphs of excruciating detail. But one does not need to go too far in the opposite direction; in fact, doing so denies crucial characterization.
In an unpublished submission, I had a pair of time travellers from the real world conducting an espionage mission against the soldiers of a fantastical civilization resembling a mix of Tang dynasty China and ancient Rome. They used a magic weapon I called the Confusion Beam to temporarily scramble their adversaries’ brains while they made their escape. When I was a younger and less experienced writer, I might have written out several paragraphs and then scrapped the whole scene. But I’m more experienced than I was when I first started writing creatively as a teenager. In just two sentences, I was able to show the bewitched soldiers dancing and singing a nursery rhyme while their leader watched with confusion and horror, and my time travellers ducked into a nearby cave.
The other kind of “darlings” are characters created by an author who treats them as a close friend or even as their own child. Sometimes, to the detriment of the story, which is why one is told that they must “kill their darlings”. But it can be difficult to put such a character’s soul to rest. They become like a wandering spirit; they will try to sneak their way back into a newer story. And they will even change form if they have to do so.
In my recent short story submission, I have a character named Clair who is actually a literal spirit, but he evolved from a ghost boy I created as a karmic trickster who would play pranks on the living, but was actually trying to teach them important moral lessons in the process. He would actively speak to the humans he was haunting, but they treated him more like a goofy rascal than a grim reaper, much to his chagrin. Eventually, I watched this Taiwanese horror movie, Silk, about a quiet, seemingly harmless ghost boy who kills a few of the scientists keeping him prisoner. Filled with new inspiration, I did away with the karmic trickster elements altogether. I opted for a more enigmatic kind of being whose deeds would convey a sense of ambiguous innocence. By design, Clair is a voiceless being who wears a strange shawl from which the voices of the dead can be heard. He spends his days inside a spirit house in which he turns to the size of a pixie. That spirit house is owned by Adelon & Sahar, the same time travellers mentioned earlier. At night, he stands vigil over the neighbourhood, waiting to strike down any malevolent supernatural beings that may pass through the area. And when not fighting wandering spirits, he happily shares the food offerings left out for him with his songbird friends. Clair is no threat to humans. Or is he?
That is the question Adelon and Sahar must answer in my upcoming submission. One morning, they wake up to their neighbour, Mrs. Chen, a mother of three, frantically knocking on the door. The lifeless body of a mailman was found in her backyard, near her youngest daughter’s bedroom window. Not only that, but the ghostly footprints of a human child directly emerge from the wall, making their way through the snow and toward the mailman’s corpse. The video cameras reveal that Clair saw this intruder in the middle of the night, but for some reason, there is missing footage. And of course, this happens “off-screen” so the reader only sees the aftermath. But a few days later, the autopsy reveals the intruder’s cause of death: a heart attack. However, even the autopsy cannot uncover whether Clair intentionally triggered a medical event using his psychic powers or if he accidentally “jumpscared” the intruder to death. Clair and the original ghost boy character cannot truly be identified as the same being due to having diverged so much from each other. The karmic trickster has truly been put to rest.
However, Adelon & Sahar are the “undead darlings” of an earlier story whose souls have returned to the page (or the screen). When I first created Adelon, the teenage youth and his twin sister Sahar, they were envisioned as nomadic heroes in search of a champion. That champion was somewhat of an edgelord, admittedly. He was a demigod son of Hades, whom I quickly realized was quite unsympathetic for various reasons, so I “killed” him off and had Adelon take the reins of the story. But then I realized Adelon and Sahar were unsuitable in their then-forms. The personalities I had given them at the time made them come across as flat characters: Adelon came off as an extreme cowardly lion, and Sahar came off as an extreme tomboy. So I scrapped them both. However, Adelon kept trying to sneak back into my creative writing projects. He took various forms (with completely different personalities) to do so. At one point, he transformed into an avatar of the god of destruction, Murdamiron. But eventually, I rediscovered this book series I had enjoyed during childhood, The Magic Treehouse, and realized something: The original Adelon and Sahar could work just fine; their personalities simply need to complement each other just as Jack and Annie’s personalities do.
Nicholas Wolf is currently writing a fantasy novel set in an ancient world (with features of East and West) where the people revere deities of birth and death resembling the dinosaurs from our own world’s distant past. The humans there command the power of the mysterious Hadatán, beings in the form of ancient life who are the mosaic-bound personifications of all reality. Nicholas is profoundly deaf and has worn a cochlear implant since he was very young. He is an alumnus of the University of Toronto where he studied English literature and Chinese philosophy. Most recently, he completed a Publishing Certificate.
The views and opinions expressed in blog posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of all WiT members.
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