Secrets
Exclusive Behind-the-Pages Looks into Shadowed Summer
Secret #4 - Murdered Darlings
Sometimes, the hardest part of writing a book is unwriting it. When you finish a first draft, you get to savor the success for a few days... and then you have to go back and murder your darlings. Kill the pieces that you love, but that don't actually serve the story.And of course, Shadowed Summer had some darlings that have gone on to a better place... I hope. Two of these darlings may actually come back- zombie ideas- so I'd like to share them with you!
One was a boy named Sara Borne. His full name was Saracen Damascus Borne, which his mother named him after watching a documentary on the Crusades when she was laboring at the hospital. (This pleased his daddy, Robert Lee Borne to no end, let me tell you.) Anyway, Sara ended up being the boy who painted his fingernails black and wore eyeliner, oh, and pretty much got beaten up for being a boy named Sara who wore fingernail polish and eyeliner.
In the early drafts, he served a purpose that later, another more central character took on. I only mentioned Sara once- he wasn't an active character, so it made sense to fold his purpose into somebody who would be doing things besides prettying up one paragraph in Chapter 4.
But I still love Sara Borne, and one of these days, I'm gonna use him. Mark my word!
The second thing was a passage about Show and Tell gone wrong in Iris' elementary school. One of the students brought in his grandmother's commitment papers because in general, you're allowed to go crazy with respect in Ondine. You had to do something really crazy to get sent to the state hospital!
And this girl's grandmother had. She went down to the cemetery the night after her husband's funeral, dug him up, and brought him home for Sunday dinner. And that's how her granddaughter had real commitment papers to show off. Show and Tell was eventually canceled after one of the kids brought in antique pictures of the Civil War dead in all their gory glory.
This section got cut because it was all narrative and went on too long. There were better, more active ways to illuminate the points I needed to make. But I still love that story and there's an excellent chance I'll end up using that somewhere, too. Just, you know, more actively.