I know I've said it before, but editing isn't the creative bit. It's the boring bit and the part that hurts.
"The part that hurts?" you ask.
Yes. My husband and a few of our friends refer to part of this process as "killing your darlings". This name may have come from another writer, I don't know. But the idea is that when you edit something you have to pick and choose the pieces of your writing to keep and the pieces of the writing to throw away.
Killing my darlings is complicated. I grow attached to my stories, or characters and have a very hard time letting go of things that I have put so much time and effort in to. Characters are especially painful to cut out of a story, but if they're no longer helping the story grow, then they have to be cut out. I hate it.
I'm in the process of writing another short story and am struggling with a couple parts of the editing process.
1- I have some imagery that is very obvious, and I feel like it's too obvious. I want to include allusions to it, but haven't figured out how to do it yet. (This one's not particularly challenging, I've just been indecisive)
2- I couldn't decide how to end the story so I wrote multiple endings. Now, I have to "kill off" all my endings but one. They all have things I really like, and I'm sure I'll end up with a weird mash-up ending that includes parts of each, but I am not looking forward to tossing out so many pages of writing.
Editing, or killing your darlings is such a painful process I'd rather just keep writing new stories to avoid ever getting to that point. But then I'd never be producing any of value would I?
-Brandolyn
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