Lol the "efficiency" discourse from writing classes has really done a number on people's psyches hasn't it It is necessary for me to enjoy writing the thing and people to enjoy reading it If you take away something that people enjoy, you have removed something necessary
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"Kill your darlings" is one of those pithy, vague sayings that's gotten a lot of traction because it sounds really badass and tough and mean, and there's always a ready market for getting advice that feels like abuse so it feels like you're really doing something
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But like all such pieces of advice if you really dissect it's just a tautology "Only keep the stuff that's actually good and get rid of the stuff that's bad"
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The key thing about "Kill your darlings" is it's advice they give to talented people and trust them to apply their talent to it There is nothing about that advice that makes a bad writer into a good writer
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There isn't a "Great Master" in history who, if you gave their MS to a rando student and told them to "kill the darlings", the student wouldn't turn into generic garbage
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Melville's Moby Dick was better than most people's books in its purest rough draft state, before anyone edited it at all, and if you gave it to some dipshit to edit so they pared it down to a 150-page story "He went to kill the whale, and the whale got him!" you'd ruin it
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Really not the point but... A *92* tweet thread is just fucking ludicrous.
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It's so wild that there's plenty of gratuitous fight scenes and infodumps in SFF books all the time but the only thing anyone complains about is sex scenes (when they're consensual, anyway; many genre readers are fine with graphic rape)
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Who has ever read the manual for a forklift?
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Even the forklift operators could probably wing it.
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