“If you want what the syllables want, just do your job.” So says poet Charles Wright. Since he wrote this in the context of a poem, it’s not exactly writing advice, but that’s the way I’ve always read it. On a syllabic level, the proposal I sent to Claudia Cross yesterday works. It flows. There are no awkward juxapositions in those beginning chapters, except a couple of places where I deliberately put them, for effect. So just on pure sound, pure sentence flow and syllable silkiness, I’m good.
It’s the whole rest of the thing that I’m not so sure of. Elizabeth Berg says: “You have to be in love with the writing itself, with the solitary and satisfying act of sitting down and watching something you hold in your head and your heart quietly transform itself into words on a page.”
I’m good with the first part of this, because I love the act of writing, I love that whole creative process of turning my mental images into story. What I don’t have a firm grip on is what is lost during the transformation process. With Berg, and with all super-talented writers, nothing is lost. That’s why reading their work takes our normal breath away, puts us inside the words, living the continuous dream as it unfolds, syllable by syllable.
As I read through my chapters yesterday, I slashed everything that jerked me out of the continuous dream. Several paragraphs. Parts of sentences. Two entire scenes. All gone, and yet, the syllables had done an admirable job. That’s what Faulkner’s famous writing advice “kill your darlings” means. It’s not enough to love the way the words sound. It’s not enough to love the ideas those words promote. They have to make sense in the context of the story, in the context of the character, or they have to die.
Proposal’s in the mail, sans darlings.