Kill Your Darlings

I’ve noticed the people often talk about God as the master of whatever it is they do. My parents say God is the master teacher. As teachers, they stand in awe of his pedagogy. But I’ve heard him called the master gardener, artist, and scientist—whatever we are, whenever we really come to love something, we see how good God is at it. It’s probably unsurprising, then, that I think of God as the master storyteller. And by master, I do mean master of His craft, but I also mean master in terms of a master and apprentice. God isn’t just a brilliant storyteller—He teaches us how to write our stories.

I’ve had a lot of writing teachers, and they’ve taught me a lot of things, like how to write topic sentences and where the commas go. The thing they teach most consistently though, is what to cut. Over and over again, I’ve sat in offices while my professors read through my work, drawing lines through paragraphs or scribbling in the margins. I’ve read the titles of their books until they look up and give the diagnosis. Once, Steve pointed to an underlined bit and said, “I think this sentence would be better not existing.” When Peter gave back the first draft of my thesis, he said, “I liked some of this, I just didn’t mark those things.” “Unnecessarily flippant” is what one of my favorite professors said about several of my favorite bits of one paper, probably because I was getting a bit impatient with historians being so sexist.

Sometimes my writing masters have been more gentle, but they all say things like that. What every writer really needs is a good editor to read through their stuff and say, “Nope. Not that.”

Sometimes cutting things feels like death. If you’ve been working on drafts of that paper for weeks, a mentor handing it back and saying to start again feels like they weighed your soul and found it inadequate. Or sometimes you’ve labored and labored to get this one thing in, to make it fit, because you just love that idea so much, and when you go into your teacher’s office, they point straight to it and say, “That doesn’t work.”

In writing, cutting, especially cutting things you’ve labored and loved over, is sometimes referred to as “killing your darlings” (or, alternatively, “killing your babies,” a metaphor that is Abrahamic probably only by coincidence, but who knows?). It’s the idea that sometimes you have to cut things even when you absolutely do not want to, even if it’s actually pretty good. Sometimes you have to cut something not because it in and of itself is bad, but because it makes the whole worse. Good as that paragraph is on its own, it makes the paper weaker.

If I find this hard to do in writing, I think it’s understandable that I find it almost impossible to do in life. Eight years of higher education have made me pretty open to professors telling me to throw out that line. But it’s way, way harder for me when I take something I’ve worked for to God and He says no.

“But why?” I’ve prayed when relationships, jobs, and schooling didn’t work out. “What was wrong with that one? Don’t you want me to get married/not go into debt/be educated?”

I was feeling this way one day between degrees, when it seemed like every good idea I had led to a dead end, and then I remembered killing your darlings. I remembered sitting with my own students, going over their papers, and how attached they were to bits of writing that were, honestly, good, but drew away focus from what was important or just showed up where it shouldn’t have been.

The writing metaphor made it easier for me, because no matter how good I get at writing, I know I’m going to need editors. I’m not going to see things that I need to see, just like my students couldn’t. And if I can’t see my writing clearly, how on earth could I see my life clearly? And If I can trust a professor to look over my work and give me feedback, surely I can trust God to do the same.

Hundreds of times in professors’ offices, I wished that they could have said, “No, don’t go down that road” before I’d ever started the draft. Why write seventeen pages of something that I’m just going to scrap? But I knew then that they couldn’t give feedback on unwritten drafts. I knew there was no wasted writing, that even things that will not see the light of day honed my craft.

So of course I have to live things before God can give me feedback on it. God can’t shortcut me to the end result anymore than my professors could. If I run into dead ends, then they’re all still leading somewhere. Every abandoned path is part of where I’m going, part of who I’m becoming. And if it requires sacrifice, sometimes, abandoned paths and abandoned paragraphs—well, I’m here to write a good paper, not a good paragraph.