What did it cost you to make each sentence? How many hours did you spend laboring over each page, writing and rewriting each chapter? Sweat and blood have been spilled. Ink and coffee too. Maybe nothing has ever been harder, but you truly believe the words final draft when you say them, when you append “Final” to your novel’s file name.
Let’s call that file DreamOfHorses.Final.docx.
You’re proud. You’re excited. You give the book to a first reader and then a second. You give the book to an agent at a conference. To a friend’s kind editor. Everyone offers similar feedback. It’s a little long. It’s a little shaggy. Too many plot points lead to places that exist only in your head, despite your efforts to get it all on the page.
You’re discouraged but undaunted. Don’t you believe in DreamOfHorses.docx, even if it’s no longer .Final? You do another rewrite. Then another. Your first reader enthusiastically digs back in. Your second reader never responds, and you vow to someday forgive her. So many agents stock so many conference schedules, and you pitch them all. Everyone loves your protagonist. An agent cornered beside a conference buffet praises your prose as ambitiously lyrical but doesn’t bite. No one does. Maybe the book’s still a bit long. Maybe some scenes still confuse every reader, no matter how essential they are to you. Are you sure you need this bit at the haberdashery? What if you cut back on the horse genealogies? Is it really necessary to have so many names starting with B? Couldn’t you at least combine the Björns?
But one day your second reader finally reappears with your pages, now thickened with her red ink. It’s going to be a good book, she offers. But it’s time to kill your darlings. All the greats do it, she says.
After she leaves you read her suggestions for cutting sentences and story lines you’ve worked and reworked for years. All the horses’ ancestors! All the Björns and their hat shops! Doesn’t she know you love every word of this world?
It hurts to let so much sincere effort go. But what if instead of killing your darlings, you merely culled them?
You comb through the manuscript, a new ruthlessness in your heart as you remove sentences, paragraphs, whole scenes. You’ve heard Hemingway’s iceberg theory—“The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water”—but until now you didn’t understand that sometimes a writer has to make the whole iceberg first. Nothing is lost, nothing is wasted. As Elie Wiesel once said: “Even those pages you remove somehow remain.” And maybe nothing you cut is bad. It’s just that it’s not as good as the rest. Knives out, you dream of a herd of horses like the one in your book, living wild and free and strong, galloping over the prairies. There are so many predators out there on the plains. Maybe even the most beloved horses can’t all make it through the winter. But you’d never know their grief by the way the survivors run.
Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (Custom House, 2021), which was a New York Times Notable Book, and the craft book Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts (Soho Press, 2022), a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision.
