The Hidden Excerpts by MaryJanice Davidson From UNDEAD AND UNEASY, Book 6 (in which Betsy is planning her wedding, and sampling wedding cake flavors with Marc)
“The search is over.” Marc sprayed me lightly with crumbs as he made his announcement in the middle of the Pat-A-Cake bakery on Lake Street. “This is the cake of cakes. The dream cake. The only cake. We’re done now.”
“And when are you two getting married?” the baker, a lovely woman who did not look like she was surrounded by pastry all day, asked brightly.
“After the world blows up,” I replied before Marc could zing me. “And maybe not even then. This is my maid of honor, kinda. He’s not the groom.”
“She won’t put Fag of Honor on the invites,” he complained to the pastry chef, who had managed to hang onto her smile. “And her best friend keeps threatening not to show. But we’ll fix that when the time comes.”
The Thousand Names Blog Tour: Launching The Shadow Campaigns
The Butcher’s Bill: Kill Your Darlings by Django Wexler
The phrase “In writing, you must kill your darlings” comes to us from William Faulkner, and like any pithy aphorism it has often been misused and misinterpreted. It doesn’t literally refer to killing your characters. Rather, ‘darlings’ means bits of prose, pieces that you’re particularly happy with or proud of.
It’s often passed on as writing advice, but (to my mind, at least) it’s not so much advice as a warning. Every writer has pieces of the story that they love: a clever exchange of dialogue, an apt simile, a telling detail. We’re not being advised to eliminate these things—why would we?—but reminded that they are ‘good’ only in service to the story as a whole.
When the time comes for editing, sometimes they have to go. There is always the temptation to twist the story to save them, to rewrite another dialogue so you can use that bon mot, or divert the heroine to Australia so she can experience that beautiful sunrise you spent so much time on. Faulkner (and generations of writing teachers since) tells us that sometimes you have to let go, to consign your favorite phrases to the trash in the confidence that, when the time comes, you’ll come up with some more.
The original draft of The Thousand Names we submitted to the publishers was about 15% longer than the final version. My editors (I’m in the unusual and excellent position of having two great editors who work together, one from the US and one from the UK) agreed that the book’s pacing could be improved by slimming it down, and offered some hints on what could go.
One of the things we agreed to take out was a series of dream sequences, in which Winter remembers her life back in the Vordanai orphanage known as the Prison and her meetings with the girl whose face haunts her dreams. I liked these sequences a lot, but with an outsider perspective I could see they didn’t fit—they were completely different, tonally, from the rest of the book, and occupied a lot of pages without moving the plot forward. (Plus, as my editor pointed out, dreams don’t usually work like a movie reel of convenient flashbacks!) Getting rid of them was painful, but it was the right thing to do. Kill your darlings.
***
But in this wonderful new age of the internet, sometimes they can come back to life! The following is a scene from the “cutting room floor” of The Thousand Names, taking place when Winter was a young teenager, several years before the events of the book. Enjoy!
From Concept to Completion, or, How a Blink becomes a Book by T.M. Goeglein Want to start up a fiction writer like an outboard motor, I mean, really get him babbling about inspiration and motivation, memories and ‘a moment that changed my life’? As him where his ideas come from. And then put on your … Read more
