Bay Leaves
Ooohh, that best/worst feeling when you create a throwaway character for one scene and you accidentally fall in love with them and want to drag them around the rest of the story because they are so cool but they don't really fit so you have to let them go sit in their one-scene corner and you feel a little bit like your heart is being torn out….
This has happened to me THREE TIMES now, which I think is wildly unfair.
I do have a penchant for falling for relatively minor characters—this has been a trend with me since I was small and my favorite character in the Hobbit was not Bilbo or Thorin or Gandalf, but Beorn. (No, I don’t know why I fixated on him either. I was six. He was a BEAR! It was cool.) (Samwise is by far my favorite Tolkien character nowadays.) But I never really gave much thought to how difficult it is to know a character is a minor character and to write them accordingly, even if you love them best.
Part of the reason the Last Seven Deaths is still in revisions and I haven’t really looked at it in years is because I know that my favorite character—who I originally created to be a nameless bandit who died in chapter two—really doesn’t belong in the whole book. But Havander is quite possibly my favorite character I’ve ever written, and he loves being the center of attention, and he takes up far more of my brainspace than he should. So in the first and second and third drafts of L7D, he’s everywhere. He keeps popping up like a stubborn little dandelion, and I know, I know I have to kill him off in the next draft, but… I can’t. I love him so much.
I have a lot of feelings about the phrase “Kill your darlings.”
I know every writer has a lot of feelings about the phrase “Kill your darlings.”
I very much subscribe to the reading of that line that says it’s not about actually killing your characters—it’s about knowing when something in your draft, be it a character or a particularly good bit of banter or a setting description you love, is taking up too much space. Like a bay leaf in your spaghetti sauce recipe, some things need to hang out for a while, give the story flavor, but then be removed. They’ve served their purpose. They’ve helped create the story. Now it is time for them to bow out and let other flavors take up the main plot.
I never delete my bay leaves; I have a document for every project called the Bay Leaves Of [Title], and I copy/paste all my favorite bits that no longer serve the narrative and I pull them out occasionally to reread them and feel better about myself and my writing.
But damn it is hard to remove the bay leaves sometimes. And it can be so hard to know when to remove them. And then I end up with Havander who thematically really should actually die to simplify the plot of act one, and the Mountain who needed to be used sparingly or he became a wildly overwhelming presence in the story of the Summer Treaty, and now Marlène, who we are going to leave behind in prison where she belongs even if I have a fully fleshed out backstory for her that I really want to shoehorn into the main crew’s dynamic because I think she’s cool.
Minor characters are the bane of my existence and I adore them.
And maybe I might have a new Bay Leaves document because for the first time in three years I am far enough along in a project to have bay leaves. Which is pretty cool.
Nobody say anything too loudly, or the story will spook and run away and I’ll just be left with Marlène and no plot.
Here’s to bay leaves and actually writing for the first time in forever!
-N