Kill Your Darlings: My First Reading
Aaron Netsky
“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – wholeheartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” So wrote and spoke Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the English poet, author, and critic who lectured on writing and is the first documented sharer of the advice more popularly phrased as, “kill your darlings.” That’s a hard bit of wisdom to live by. “Darling:” beloved, precious, dearest. “Murder/Kill:” …there’s really no need for synonyms, those are the best words for what they mean. One, understandably, finds it very hard to do away with one’s most adored. And yet, Oscar Wilde, Eudora Welty, Allen Ginsberg, and William Faulkner are just a few of the great writers known to have passed the advice along. It is something all writers hear and fear. I have struggled with it, myself. Even with articles written for this very blog, I go over and over them deleting wit and wisdom that really has no place in the piece but seemed like the world’s best phrasing at the time. With longer pieces, like plays, it is harder: more words, more work, more that I don’t want to admit I didn’t need to put in. This is why the very first public reading of a play I wrote, just a few days ago, was so important.
Putting together a reading is nerve-wracking, at least it was for me. Fortunately, I had the resources of a small theatre company, including their space and a corral of actors. As an actor, also, who has occasionally been asked to read at a reading with this company (only stage directions so far), I know that it is an exciting thing to be asked: an opportunity to perform a brand-new play! But as the writer who has to ask the actor, who I’ve maybe just met or not met at all, the prospect of saying, “Will you read these words I wrote for this name?” feels like asking more than too much, and also feels just as awkward as that version of the question looks on your screen (when I actually reached out, I phrased it better than that). As someone who has never aspired to be a stage manager, telling everyone, “Rehearsal will be at this time and place,” was also more difficult than it should have been for me, as was running the rehearsal when we were all there. But I am glad all of this was required of me because if I am lucky enough to have more such opportunities, I’ll be better prepared because of this experience.
When I go through my writing, more often than not I read it aloud to myself, and this includes plays. I’ve heard myself having the exchanges that add up to the play that was being read more times than I can remember, but it never sounded like it did coming out of five people who were not me, some of whom were much more suited to the characters than I was. This was necessarily jarring, because as alien as it sounded, that is how plays work, for the most part (the next night I took in a one-person play written by the actor performing it; I imagine development of that play was a bit more streamlined, but I don’t know for sure). They didn’t sound like me, but I kept reminding myself to trust them: they had read the script, they had thought about what was written, about who their characters were, and they were doing their best to lift them off the page. It was all based on what I had created, it was how someone else interpreted it, someone who did not know what my intent was beyond what I had provided. So, if something about it felt wrong, maybe it was my contribution that had to change, which is an insight I can’t get from reading it aloud to myself. The problem is, I still wasn’t quite sure what.
More became clear during the talkback portion of the evening, built in to this theatre company’s process. The audience and actors responded to what had been presented, and I hurried to write down key words to help me remember each question, comment, and concern. This was why I had submitted my play for consideration for a reading, to gather input on a larger scale than one individual at a time who probably read it quietly to themself. Not that there is anything wrong with such input, but all kinds of input are important. These people had not only witnessed the reading itself, they had heard each other laughing or groaning throughout, had a thought not only about the material but about how their fellow viewers were responding to it. So many thoughts to consider. But my mind is merely a sink that can receive dirty dishes; it requires help to get them washed. Enter the hands of the person I walked sixty blocks home with, someone, you guessed it, I trust enough to live with me, and who therefore I was able to discuss the discussion with. That’s when the solutions to the problems and the acceptance of the compliments truly started to make themselves known. It was the beginning of the digestion process, which continues even now and shows no signs of stopping, though it is mostly in my head at this point.
I am ready to kill my darlings (I’m more comfortable with the “kill” version than “murder,” it seems less violent for some reason). I am ready to cut lines, change the shape of the play, finally give a character a real reason to be on stage for as long as he is, clean up things that have always seemed just slightly off but which I still liked way more than I disliked them. “Kill your darlings” doesn’t mean get rid of every single flare, that would be crazy. Sometimes that thing you’re really proud of actually is quite good, does add to what you’ve created in a meaningful way, and you should keep it. “Kill your darlings” is more about willingness. I wasn’t willing, before, to really go in with a pair of shears. I knew it wasn’t done, it wasn’t perfect, but I couldn’t spot why. And Grammarly wouldn’t have helped. And even when I’ve done everything I can think of based on what happened during and after the reading, it still won’t be done. But it will be ready to be heard again, maybe even heard and, to some extent, seen. And, after that, back to the cutting board. Around and around we go.
Aaron Netsky (@AaronNetsky on Twitter, @aaron_netsky on Instagram) is a singer, writer, actor, and all-around theatre professional who has worked off and off-off Broadway and had writing published on AtlasObscura.com, TheHumanist.com, Slate.com, StageLightMagazine.com, and ThoughtCatalog.com, as well as his own blogs, Cantonaut (http://cantonaut.blogspot.com) and 366 Musicals (https://366days366musicals.tumblr.com), and his Medium account.