The title of the new Daniel Radcliffe vehicle, Kill Your Darlings, cleverly cross-references a familiar piece of writerly advice and the suggestion of murder. It also, according to my Harry-Potter-besotted students, effectively nullifies that piece of advice for at least as long as it conjures, not ruthless editing, but the image of a skinny, innocent, bespectacled Allen Ginsberg.
This short classroom discussion got me ruminating on writing advice. Killing darlings is usually a bitter but memorable pill, if you can get it down your gullet. A New Yorker editor once handed it to me in a different form. “You must learn,” she said in the gravelly voice of experience, “to write badly.” Meaning: to take the risks of stop-and-start dialogue, of bodies described without metaphor, of entering into the voice of an inarticulate protagonist; to dare to describe a boring place, as Flaubert…