Who advised writers to 'murder your darlings' ? The answer will surprise you, says Griselda Heppel.
Here’s a quiz question for you.
This is why writing gets more difficult the more you do it because your own standards are continually rising, and why the best writing can seem deceptively simple, with the reader hardly being aware she’s reading at all. It’s like a clear window pane through which the eye can delight in the outside world, without being distracted by decorations and etchings in the glass.
The Art of Writing by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch consists of twelve lectures given by the King Edward VII Professor of English in the fledgling English faculty of Cambridge in 1913.
Just about every new writer will, at some time or other, be advised to ‘murder your darlings’. By which is meant not bumping off your nearest and dearest to give you AT LAST a bit of peace and quiet to create… but exerting discipline over what you’re creating. If you have written a passage you’re particularly proud of, with elaborate, flowery images, elegant use of words – the best of fine writing, in short – then delete it. The chances are you’ve strayed into a self-conscious writerliness, in which pace and plot have been sacrificed to draw attention to your own beautiful prose, or (in my case) to set up a joke I’m desperate to squeeze into the story.
It doesn’t work. The narrative must come first. Every bit of scene setting or character depiction, every scrap of dialogue and, yes, every joke needs to further the plot.
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| Writing should be like a clear pane of glass. Photo by Magda Ehlers: https://www.pexels.com/ photo/rustic-wooden-window-overlooking-bushveld-31615407/ |
So now where was I… oh yes, the quiz question.
Who coined this pithy phrase? Bet you can’t guess.
I found out by accident. And you could have knocked me down with a feather (does anyone even say that these days?).
A doctor friend has always raved about a book about literary style he happened to read as an undergraduate, and whose advice he's aimed to follow in his own scientific/medical articles and reports ever since. (Kudos to him, say I.)
Recently he tracked down a copy of this book and presented it to me.
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| Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch By Not stated - The Bookman: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp. 32101077276838;view=1up;seq=265;size=125, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39288179 |
It’s hard to believe now, but English as a degree subject (modern languages too) is much younger than we realise. Until the late 19th century, only Latin and Greek literature were considered worthy of study, with Oxford and Cambridge being particularly slow to get going. (Full marks to University College London, who established a chair in English Language and Literature in 1828, a good 60 or so years before Oxford and Cambridge.)
Q, as Quiller-Couch was known, used this early lecture series to champion the legacy of great literature, from the Ancient Greeks and Romans to Middle English, to the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment, and, finally, to the top prose writers of the nineteenth century. His philosophy was that only through reading and studying the greats could undergraduates learn the clarity of expression, communication and appropriateness of language that would render them fine writers themselves, whether as poets, playwrights or masters of prose. (Interestingly, novels don’t feature at all in Q’s world, presumably because the English syllabus was moulded on the familiar Classics tripos: all poetry, plays and histories, none of this new-fangled fiction malarkey.)
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| None of this new-fangled fiction malarkey in the fledgling Cambridge English tripos. |
And about two-thirds of the way through the series, we get this:
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. Murder your darlings.
So there you have it.
A man most people will never have heard of, whose work nowadays is barely read, published a lecture series over 100 years ago in which that most modern, most pungent, even slightly shocking advice given to all aspiring writers leaps out as if only coined yesterday.
As I said, you could have knocked me down with a feather.
Find out more about Griselda Heppel here:
and her children's books:
Comments
Thanks for the post which made me wonder what my own darlings are??
I think Q is remembered chiefly for the Oxford Book of Verse but it turns out he wrote a lot of short stories, including the shivery 'Rollcall of the Reef' which my English teacher gave us to read age 11.
Fiction must have been introduced fairly quickly into the English degree syllabus but I don't know when. My father, who read Greats (Classics) at Oxford in the 1930s, could for the rest of his life never quite shake off the conviction that the only non-classical literature worth reading was Shakespeare. A different world.