I used to tell my students, as I’d been taught, “kill your darlings”: cut characters, plot lines, and images that don’t seem to be serving the piece. The advice seemed especially sound since it’s attributed to an assortment of prestigious writers (notably Allen Ginsberg, William Faulkner, and Stephen King).
But when it came up in creative writing classes I taught, I could sense it made my students distraught. They’d come to me later and ask if they could submit something new entirely—No one liked it, they’d say. It isn’t any good. I’ll write something else.
In true academic tradition, in the process of killing the darlings, we had also killed the joy of writing.
In the past several years, I’ve come to learn that the traditional creative writing workshop is rooted in white patriarchy—i.e., Follow OUR rules or else you don’t belong here! Write something *I’ll* enjoy! Be silent so I can tell you what’s wrong! Now in creative writing workshops, I start with two questions directed to the writer whose work is being workshopped: “What do you love about this piece? What would devastate you to lose?” Some students light up, others shift uncomfortably in their seats, perhaps because, like me, they grew up being told to be humble. I tell them, like I had to tell myself long ago, “It’s ok to love your own work. In fact, you need to, you need to love what you’re doing, what you’re trying to express to the world.”
Asking this question, and having student-writers put explanatory language around their own writing, allows both the feedback-giver and the student-writer to understand what is actually the heartbeat of the piece. Maybe it’s a poem and it started off about forests and peace but took a swerve into the star-scape and became about an existential crisis. Does the student-writer love the forest, or does she love outer space? And if she loves both, what suggestions can be made to keep both?
There’s something that draws the writer back to the page over and over again—what is that thing? How can we preserve it so the writer comes back to it again, so that she doesn’t come to a place where she hates what she’s doing?
In the writing workshop, each individual feedback-giver is going to love something different. And you can’t predict what an editor will like, what they’ll want to include in their literary magazine. At the end of the day, writers must love their own work—they must want to return to it over and over, to polish it, to truly make it shine, to take what they love and make it pop in pleasure.
Cutting extraneous language, true editing, is still an essential skill, and my students and I spend several class sessions talking about ways to make their intended meaning—what exactly they love—as clear as possible. But the dynamic changes when students know they can keep the words, phrases, images, and scenes that they love.
–
Melody Heide’s writing has appeared on the Brevity Blog and in Blue Lake Review, Switchback Magazine, and the anthology Love & Profanity: A Collection of True, Tortured, Wild, Hilarious, Concise, and Intense Tales of Teenage Life. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Minnesota State University and teaches at Anoka-Ramsey Community College.