Life After Death for the Darlings

I'll get to this week's topic in just a minute, but wanted to repeat the special announcement Donna made yesterday about an upcoming week on the YAMuses blog.  

We're going to feature our "reader request" week for September 3rd and we need to hear from YOU!  What questions do you have for the Muses?  What topics would you like to see covered?  Please comment on today's post (or any post this week) and mention what you'd like to discuss with us.

This week we're talking about killing our darlings.  It's such a bittersweet term, isn't it?  It smacks of infanticide and "tough love."  And that horrible sentence, "This is going to hurt me much more than it hurts you."  Or the even worse one, "It's not you, it's me."  What about the poor darlings?  What about their feelings?  What happens to them after?

I can't speak to everyone's darlings.  Donna puts hers in a coma.  Bret has a graveyard.  But what about the darlings that just can't be reused?  What about my scene with Anne of Cleves, so happy and hopeful on her triumphant (and ultimately ill-fated) journey into London as Queen?  What do you do with that?

Well, you can reuse it in a blog post, I suppose.

Or just use those darlings in a different way.  Because there is a life after death for darlings, I am a firm believer.  They may just be shapeshifters, ghosts, or reincarnations.

Let me explain by telling a story.  More than a year and a half ago, I was compiling ideas for Book 2 of my series.  Trying out and discarding historical sequences.  Skidding around the idea of historical characters.  Unsure what to settle on or how to approach it all.  Flailing a little, but happily still.  Composting, as Donna says.

I drove my kids up to see my parents for Thanksgiving.  This is a five-to-six hour journey, depending on how many times we have to stop for bathroom breaks/letting the dog out/coffee/carsickness/roadworks.  But things had settled down and the music was playing softly, the dog was snoring and the kids nearly so.  And a voice came to me (yes, just like that.) Like Joan of Arc only these weren't voices telling me what to do, this was the voice of a character.  Begging to be written.  This girl had a voice that can only be described as sassy and the comments she made about the English court and the fashion choices and over-inflated egos of some of its inmates made me fall in love with her.  This was the character I needed to write.  This character had something to say.

I pulled out my index cards at the next roadworks and jotted down some of my ideas.  Some of her observations.  Already formulating the first chapter.  Submerging the reader in her voice at the get-go.

Are you ready for this?  I never keep a first chapter.  I often write a keeper of a first chapter after the third or fourth revision.  So all those observations?  Those snappy little snarky remarks?  Gone with the darlings.

What remained was the voice.  I knew she could make those snappy comebacks.  I knew what she thought of the people around her, even if she didn't vocalize it (all the time).  I knew how she felt about her own presence at court and about the attitudes of everyone else.  All of that remained.  That voice was the true darling.  Not what she said, but how she said it.

There is life after death for darlings.  Because in this business, nothing is ever wasted.