When you find yourself truculently bedighting your scrivenery with inimical prose, serried and thick as chaparral; I, for one, recommend elision instead. Otherwise, your writing may appear solecistic, and you, as a writer, solipsismal.
What King is saying is not to avoid writing darlings, but rather to remove them from the final product. This is important because I believe that breathing life into those “darlings” is one of the best ways a writer can improve his craft.
I’d like to borrow a tired chiché from my music education experience, which is that the “practice makes perfect” mantra is misleading. Practice makes permanent is more often true. Only perfect practice makes perfect. Which raises the question: how does one practice writing?
In a society that so values monetary success, understand that the immediate lack thereof is not a sign of failure, nor is it a symptom of bad writing or flawed ideas, though that’s an easy go-to excuse.
It’s snowing again in Northern Virginia. There’s not much accumulation, mind you, but a friend of mine pointed out how oddly we Northern Virginians react to snow. As he says, we know that it’s going to snow every year, and yet it still manages to catch us off guard.
The spray of arterial blood showered me in steaming droplets. Like a broken bowl, the head wobbled across the floor until it came to rest at my feet.
This is why it’s easy to dismiss writing as “creative fun” rather than “work”. If someone were to take a peek at me during the percolation stage, they’d have reason to think I was joking around about being an author. I mean, look! He’s just staring at the screen, drooling and drinking a never-ending tumbler of iced coffee…
So when you picture a writer as that guy who sits at Starbucks® sipping his Flat White®, waiting for divine inspiration to fill his blank word document, please know that I’m going to try to slap you through the internet. And I’m not gonna feel bad about it.