Writers, dear writers, writing teachers, dreamers, note-takers and journal keepers, there is a saying we pass around like a birdie in a backyard badminton game: Kill your darlings. Murder your darlings, some say, and other variations of slaughter and love. It’s come to us from Chekov. No, wait, it’s come to us from Faulkner. No, wait—
Others before me, literary sleuths, have traced the impulse back to a lecture of 1913 or so, to a published piece from 1914, a man named Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who, it seems, published under the pseudonym “Q”.
“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.”
Quiller-Couch apparently gave a series of lectures at Cambridge University. (His lectures here)
In these lectures he carves a clear lineage, citing Roman orators and philosophers, reaching to the world of painting and other arts, encouraging young men to read the work of their predecessors and forge ahead, in an obligation to expand and assert the world of English language, literature and ideas.
He writes,
“Yes, I seriously propose to you that here in Cambridge we practise writing: that we practise it not only for our own improvement, but to make, or at least try to make, appropriate, perspicuous, accurate, persuasive writing a recognisable hall-mark of anything turned out by our English School. By all means let us study the great writers of the past for their own sakes; but let us study them for our guidance; that we, in our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span of time, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance of Shakespeare or of Burke. Portraits of other great ones look down on you in your college halls: but while you are young and sit at the brief feast, what avails their serene gaze if it do not lift up your hearts and movingly persuade you to match your manhood to its inheritance?”
Manhood.
Cambridge.
Inheritance.
His words pour forth with a sense of both obligation and lineage. Despite the gendered aspects of this particular delivery, apparently he had two sisters who were also both writers. More about his life as a soldier, a knight, a scholar and a novelist over here: Wikipedia Overview here
He writes in what I assume was the style of his era, though now reads as a bit melodramatic, perhaps a little labored:
“We found, Gentlemen, towards the close of our first lecture, that the argument had drawn us, as by a double chain, up to the edge of a bold leap, over which I deferred asking you to take the plunge with me. Yet the plunge must be taken, and to-day I see nothing for it but to harden our hearts.”
Ha! I’m picturing his “double chain,” his “bold leap” his hard heart, his manhood…and seeing through it…seeing his efforts, his ego, his barricades, his folly, his love, his fear, his human complexity, bravery and weakness.
This guy, he’s been brought in as a lecturer. It’s a good gig. He’s trying to encapsulate the writing process, to deliver.
The adage to “kill your darlings” works, in the right time and place. I’m actually all for it, late in revisions. Great writers have turned to these words, and surely made their work better, stronger, swifter. I’ve turned to these words, and held them in mind.
But today, at the start of the new year, I’m going to step in another direction. We don’t always need to “harden our hearts.” We don’t always need to kill what we love. How much and how many sweet darlings have already been killed, by that history of the British Empire? By academia? By compulsions?
Let’s do something else, for a bit.
The word “nostalgia” comes from a combination of “home” and “pain.” It is the sweet longing for a time now gone, a feeling of both pleasure and pain, hurt by the loss while loving what was. Nostalgia is a complicated emotion to contain, and a difficult combination to delivery to—or evoke in—another person, a reader, a friend. Nostalgia can be cloying, it’s true. We tend to turn away.
It also may be the closest English speakers come to the Portuguese word, Saudade—though Portuguese speakers quickly clarify there is a gulf in meaning between the two words. As an English speaker, I can only listen, and feel, when I hear a Portuguese speaker tell me about the difference. I may be wrong, but sometimes it seems the difference isn’t in the word, but in a larger cultural and historic attitude around the word. Saudade is used to reach for a nearly indescribable emotional weight of love and longing. Portugalist.com explains Saudade comes across, it seems to me, as an embraced sense of yearning, pining and love for what no longer exists or perhaps never has existed, as opposed to the un-embraced, terrifyingly cloying…English speaking...sticky terrain of nostalgia, which is also a yearning, pining and love for what no longer exists, and perhaps never existed. The difference might be about what we allow ourselves to feel, and how we connect to that larger interior world.
Do we need to fend off nostalgia, just now? We’re living in a pandemic, and as always, trapped in our individual and collective mortality, now on a dying planet, surrounded by extinction rates and clear-cutting, deforestation and climate destruction. Why not feel our love, our loss, our dreams and years, and revel in what was, at times? It’s hard, and perhaps far more difficult than “hardening our hearts”. It’s scary. It’s dangerous, to feel so much.
There are two other words, which are closely related, yet different from each other: Censor and censure.
To 'censor' means to remove, block, or interfere with the communication of another. To 'censure', on the other hand, means "to find fault with and criticize as blameworthy."
While we may not always be actively censored, it is much more often we might find ourselves censured. Surely I’m not the only one with an easily accessible montage in the mind of moments, being told to be good, be nice, play nice, be quiet, be happy, be careful, watch out! Being told, you’re wrong, that’s wrong, and then dreaded censure of, What’s wrong with you? Oh, lord. (Anyone else? Ha!)
(Side note: that idea of censure…definitely part of the beauty and power in “Girl”, by Jamaica Kincaid: "Girl" in NYr, Full Text )
Sometimes words of caution, doubt and censure come out of love and kindness, sometimes fear, or power systems. Either way, the easy part is in censuring new work, new thought, with scorn. It is unfortunately just as easy to carry this censure home, to your own pages, to start killing your darlings in infancy, already imagining the censure.
Once, at a writing conference, I sat alone with my books, eating breakfast at a large table in a crowded college cafeteria. A lovely looking older man sat his tray down at the table. He smiled and asked if he could join me. I nodded, of course, and moved my books and notebook a bit closer to my plate in an effort to take up less space, in a way that was more symbolic than practical: there was plenty of space. I was making room for another writer, another striver, another human full of dreams. He took both hands and lightly hitched up his pants legs, his slacks, and sat gracefully. Then the lines of the man’s face, his hair, his eyes, shifted from a stranger, to The Man Himself, The Legend: Arthur Miller. I was in my mid-twenties, with one published story to my name, a small prize and a literary scholarship that had brought me to the conference. Suddenly I struggled to swallow a bite of scrambled eggs, awash in my own mix of emotions, nerves and love. In that dreamy hour in which we sat together, alone, I failed to generate the thousand questions I’ve always since wished I’d asked him. I could only listen. He caught me off guard, by appearing. Maybe he was used to being a show-stopper, a conversation stopper, a shining star. I don’t know, but he carried on graciously, as though I were sufficiently holding up my side of our breakfast conversation, with my one-word answers, my head nods and nervous glances. The one thing he said that morning which I’ve carried with me ever since is this: “Write what you feel is important.” He said, “That’s what I did, when I wrote The Crucible.”
Thank you, Arthur Miller.
I wear his words in an invisible heart-shaped locket around my throat.
I’m going to encourage you to neither censor nor censure yourself, but aim for integrity. Take the history of British colonizing patriarchy off your back, just for today, just for now. If you’re writing a social media post or a novel, an essay or a dream journal, there’s always time to beat yourself with those double chains later, time to harden your heart and take the leap and the rest of it. For now, let’s go easy on ourselves.
Write what you feel is important.
Do you even know your “darlings” yet?
I believe I’m still getting to know mine.
What would you write, if you could write close to the bone, close to your own emotional truth, without worry about these voices coming down the command of power and control, soldiers and knights and Cambridge scholars, to suggest the murder of fragile efforts?
Welcome to 2022.
With all best wishes, really, seriously, and in a sea of nostalgia and saudade, in the moment yet with thoughts toward the past, thoughts toward the future,
—Monica
p.s.—that “birdie” I mention, in the first paragraph? That’s also a “shuttlecock.” Just fyi. Language! More on strong feelings about shuttlecocks, here: A Birdie? A Shuttlecock? Do We Care?
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I love this advice, especially right now. Thanks for your words, Monica.
Yes yes yes. Keeping this close when i write