Killing Your Dogs And Your Darlings

You have to kill your darlings.

The kind of line we’ve all heard, those of us cursed and blessed with the urge to write a novel, or at least a decent post or story. The darlings being the words you have finessed and fussed over forever before finally etching them in what might as well be your own blood into the page — only to realise, or to have it realised for you —  that they are not working, and they have got to go. Bye!

I have finally retired from my newspaper sub-editing day job — well they made me a voluntary redundancy offer I could not refuse, and I’m pension age, so …  — and I am finally working every day on that novelly thing I had been noodling on for ages. 

But killing my dog — and who was only fictional, by the way — that’s what it came to the other day. 

First things first: the novel is about an ageing footballer, Frankie Grady, the star man on the local GAA team which, in good old against the odds story tradition, has won nothing in years and is now going all out to do well in, or even win, that elusive county title. Frankie knows this is his last hurrah. Getting older, he has a dodgy knee and worse hip, and is dropped in the first chapter, his place taken by the proverbial new kid on the block. How he deals with this and a bunch of other stuff, as our American friends might put it, is the meat of the novel.

Reckoning the time had come to put my stuff out there and get the help and support I needed, I joined a proper writing group, under the excellent writing.ie team. 

So, with wincing but still easily excited heart, I put a 500 word extract out on their #ThursdayThreads for critique/encouragement. 

In it, Frankie, after being dropped, is licking his wounds and mulling things over — and over — while leaning on a bridge parapet in his local park. Looking at the water below stirs up memories from his childhood of his Auntie Molly and Uncle Martin and visits to their farm when he was a boy.

So I’m writing about Frankie’s first taste of unpasteurised milk from the churn, and then there’s the dreamily tedious family drives there with his mum and his beloved dad, who was still alive then.

Sure didn’t I get a bit carried away with this fictional power I was wielding, and had moved on to the old couple’s beloved dog, Woolie. A dog they never actually had.

It was so enjoyable to write: the original Woolie was an old English sheepdog I barely remembered that my Tipperary granddad owned, and here he was, reborn and transported to Co Kilkenny and living out his days in love and unspoken tenderness. 

writing.ie powerhouse Vanessa — who has the energy of at least three more pseudonyms apart from Sam Blake — was complimentary but sweetly pointed out that my little rural idyll was all fine but there was too much of it and thus it was holding up the actual plot — a distraction, in other words.

On the money. And honestly the kind of criticism I want and need, and why I joined this group. 

See, as a newspaper sub-editor, I was used to cutting other people’s darlings, or words, and as a regular blogger, at endastories.com, I have tried to be just as clinical in cutting my own words. But it’s not easy, is it?

Writing a grown-up novel, it is vital that every scene swell the progress, that every word or phrase had better be worth it. If not, it’s sayanora Woolie the dog, or anyone or thing that gets in the way.

  This was what I had written:

“And old Woolie, their shaggy old English sheepdog, lying out on the hot summer stones in front of the porch. When Woolie was younger, Uncle Martin would flick a wellingtoned foot at him when he’d be in the way. Uncle Martin wouldn’t have been one to soft-word the amiable creature padding along beside him. Love was in the bowls of water and milk, the meat scraps from Dermot their butcher. In the cleaning out of Woolie’s old bed in the kitchen to the left of the range, and in the laying down of the old grey woollen mat on the floor beside it so he wouldn’t fall on the hard stone floor”.

Okay, a confession, I haven’t actually taken fictional shovel from self-made shed and figuratively buried Woolie just yet — see, I can’t help myself from overwriting, or over-describing. I have created a document for this stuff I have to cut out and I might sneak it in later when you’re not looking. Pull the Woolie over your eyes! 

I call this document Marc Overmatters (Footie fans will get the awful dad joke pun). 

And so on I go, looking for the write words and inspiration.