Drinking the Blood of Your Darlings

In Stephen King's On Writing, he offers some of the best writing advice he can. He tells us to kill our darlings--meaning, of course, that we should get rid of anything that doesn't move the story along or contribute significantly to the plot. Sometimes our darlings are sentences, sometimes single words or perhaps even entire paragraphs or pages (I haven't yet killed entire chapters, but I've come close). And sometimes "killing your darlings" means killing off a major character because he's not really helping the story.

Last night I wielded the delete key like a madwoman and lopped off Smythe's head. I had to do it, you see. He wasn't moving the story along and, though he's been with this series (The Rapture Chronicles) since its inception ten years ago, he had to go. So...chop, chop, chop, no more Smythe.

But it wasn't enough to kill him.

See, there's a crucial space left empty by Smythe's demise (or deletion, if you'd rather think of it that way) at one point in the book that needs to be filled. Another cast member has already stepped up for the job (I'm not sure he's learned what happened to his predecessor just yet, so ixnay on the urdermay), but the scene requires...well, not Smythe, of course, but the essence of Smythe. The conversation between the wizard Kalikhan and what-once-was-Smythe-but-now-is-Gareth is crucial to that scene (and the plot), not to mention that Smythe had managed a few pretty witty lines in that scene. Lines that Gareth will be using now. So I'll be picking through the bits of Smythe that I enjoyed and Gareth will be channeling the spirit of the character he's replaced and, through it all, we see that Stephen King was right. Kill your darlings. But I'd add to that...

Drink their blood.