Faulkner once said, “in writing, you must kill your darlings.” He was referring generally to those sections of writing that you’re really in love with, but it’s also been applied to kill off your favorite characters. In this case, I’m using it to refer to characters who you created but then sort of forgot about, your bastards. Hence, I’m changing Faulker’s quote from “kill your darlings” to “kill your bastards.”
If you look at the image, you’ll see a very small (very incomplete) list of characters in the Scrivener file for my current book, SoulQuest. Yes, there are more characters than this in the book. No, I don’t have every one of them catalogued. Yes, this means sometimes scrounging through my manuscript and notes, trying to remember a character’s name. Yes, I need to get more organized, but that’s beside the point. You’ll see the last character, Jan, is selected with “Move to Trash” highlighted.
It’s a decision every writer will likely be faced with at some point in the course of a project—whether or not to excise a character that just isn’t pulling his or her own weight. If you’re lucky, this will hopefully happen before you’re 50,000 words into the book. If you’re like me, you didn’t properly revise your original outline to account for the changes that would happen.
In SoulQuest, Jan is the pilot of the Excalibur, the airship our intrepid group of sky-pirates (and unlikely heroes) travel in. Back when I was collaborating with an artist to produce SoulQuest as a comic book, Jan’s role was much larger. Not only was he the pilot, but he was also a childhood friend of Zarim, the protagonist. As this was originally planned to be an ongoing series of an undetermined length, there would have been more room to explore Zarim’s past, but when I made the decision to turn SoulQuest into a novel, a lot of changes were made. For example, in our original plans, Jan was going to die and become part of the ship. But as I was drafting the outline for the novel, this didn’t work as well for me and I decided to get rid of it.
Now the question comes, why is Jan still here? He doesn’t go on missions with the rest of the crew, and aside from one scene, he doesn’t really play an active role in the story and mostly just provides the occasional line. All he does is fly the ship, and that’s a role which, with a little rewriting, can be handled by one of the other characters.
It’s one thing to decide to remove a scene or a chapter that just doesn’t work. But to remove a whole character can be even more daunting. But if that character is just dead weight, you’re not doing the story any favors by keeping them in. Currently, I’m writing a chapter where the crew has been taken captive. Now, I already know how they’re going to get out of this, it’s in my plot. But as I was preparing to write the next scene in this chapter, I started to think to myself, “what is Jan up to right now and is there any role I can have for him in this part of the story?” And that got me thinking, “what role does Jan actually have that’s beneficial to the story?” I skimmed through my chapter notes and realized that in reality, he doesn’t serve much of a purpose. He once did, in the original plan way back when. But with all the revisions to the plan, his purpose became lost and now he’s simply become a bastard character who doesn’t have much use.
So now, I’m planning to cease writing any more scenes that include Jan and when I get started on the editing and revising of the manuscript, I’m going to have to rewrite the scenes in which he is in. A bit daunting, yes, but I don’t think it will be as difficult as it seems at first glance.
So kill your bastards. They’re not helping your story, they’re dragging it down.