“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
- William Faulkner

After looking at my notes from the previous workshop with Al and my fellow Markers, I rewrote sixty pages of the novel with suggested changes and new scenes. The value of their feedback I’ve already heralded, but there is a newfound joy in something I once feared: killing your darlings!

What power. To feel the bloated, overwritten sentence cry for mercy under the scrutiny of my unforgiving eye is unadulterated ecstasy. I never thought I would be so cruel to my own work, but oh, how good it feels. The same relief and calm I feel after ridding my closets of all that "stuff" I’ve collected and saved through the years - as it turns out, for no good reason - is the same release I feel when cutting and slashing my way through my novel. The story now has more meaning, depth, and impact, but without the weight of "my darlings," without the clutter of my own prose obscuring the clean muscular lines of the structure.

With a renewed fervor I head to my pages, wondering which precious words I am going to send to the slaughterhouse. I think of my novel as one of those chickens in the documentary "Food, Inc.," so overfed and obese that it can’t move under its own weight. Unable to turn around or walk, the chicken can only wait for its own unfortunate destiny. When I saw this documentary, I had such a severe reaction that I haven’t had chicken since. Now my novel is that chicken searching for someone to save it. The same person who made it a distended, grotesque version of a novel is the same person who is going to whittle it down to the voluptuous, taut story it should be – and that person is me.

Sure, at the beginning I felt queasy, sick with doubt about sending all those babies off to meet their maker. How could I kill the very words I sweated and fretted over to put perfectly on the page? Then I realized that if I didn’t have a cold-blooded word killer inside of me, my story was already dead, buried under its own excess. I head back into my rewrites embracing the inner assasin I once feared. Am I a language sadist? Damn straight. Watch out, prose, I am coming after you.