You might have heard us use this phrase before: “center your darlings.” What does it mean? Most simply, it’s our own spin on the more famous “kill your darlings” mantra. But there’s a lot more to it than that. This week, we get into the details. How to identify your darlings, the times when they conflict, and what it looks like to center them.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[intro music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…
Bunny: Bunny
Oren: …and…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: Uh-oh folks! I’ve written an action story, but due to some cumbersome worldbuilding elements that I don’t care about, the action plot doesn’t make sense anymore. So, I guess I have to kill my darlings and get rid of the action plot.
Bunny: When you think about it, killing your darlings is pretty action packed, though.
Chris: Obviously, that’s how writing works. You just take whatever is your favorite thing and then you take it out and bam, your story’s done.
Oren: That’s definitely what kill my darlings means, and also definitely my only option. What other option could there possibly be?
Chris: [laughs]
Bunny: It’s a shame because my darling is already centered, but I’ve been told to kill it, and so now I’m no longer writing.
Oren: We’ve solved the writing problem: just don’t write anymore.
Bunny: They say to start your story as close to the end as you can, and now the end and the beginning are just the same.
Oren: Yeah, we cut the Gordian knot.
Chris: It’s a lot easier this way.
Oren: We’re talking about the phrase center your darling, which is something we say on Mythcreants a lot. I was surprised we don’t actually have a podcast on it specifically, so I’m gonna fix that.
But this was actually Chris’s idea, so I’ll let Chris tell you what it means.
Chris: I think it’s worth saying that the reason we don’t have a podcast episode on it is because it actually originated in a podcast episode. But at that time, the phrase had not yet been in use.
But seven years ago ago—so old…
Bunny: [laughs]
Chris: We did a Writing Your Passion episode that was real popular, people really liked it. And we were talking about working with our clients. Often, they would have different story elements that were at odds with each other.
You know, like a tense plot, where the protagonist would take time off to hang out at the beach, or something like that. And the obvious solution to that is to just take out the boring beach scenes. But we always ask clients what’s important to them, and we would often discover that it’s the beach, which makes sense, cause why else would it be there?
Bunny: Look, beaches are very special places. They’re ecologically diverse. You can find cool things in tide pools. The beach is always the darling.
Chris: So in this situation, by far, the easiest fix is to kill the darling because otherwise the story would be complete. But at the same time, that’s not what the writer’s interested in, that’s not what they want. And by that stage in the writing process, trying to make the beach scenes not boring is just a huge rewrite.
At the same time, this is not an inevitable situation. It was happening because so many of our clients had something they wanted to put in their story, but they didn’t know how to make it what the story was about.
And so, they would get themselves in this situation. So, to try to help people avoid that in the first place, we started talking about centering your darlings so that later you would not have to kill them.
Oren: Which sounds kind of ominous when we say it that way. But it is more or less the way we recommend people write their stories: to try to find out what is the most important thing to you, and you make that the focus. Because your story can be about anything. It can’t be about everything.
Bunny: You have your sniper rifle pointed at either the darling or the rest of the story, and you must shoot one.
Oren: But if you plan, if you do this properly, you don’t ever get in that situation. Cause you don’t build a story that your darling’s not part of. You start from the beginning.
Chris: The article that I have that talks about my method of centering your darling, is the one called How to Turn Your Concept Into a Story. And the reason for that is because I recommend doing it immediately—as soon as you get an idea—if possible.
Because it’s amazing how fast writers get attached to the story as they imagined it, even if there are huge things that are not working about it. We get really excited about our cool new story idea and the possibilities seem endless. And then we start thinking about all these other cool things we could add to the story. Cause that just makes it cooler.
Unless you know a lot about storytelling and you’ve had a lot of practice, you may not realize that those things don’t work together.
Also, darlings can change. Sometimes it’s not possible to do this only in the idea stage because people will come back to a story that’s been in the trunk for 10 years and then they will like something different about it, for instance.
Oren: I mean, the worst scenario is that you start with your story and then you realize some part of it is actually what interests you the most. So, you start working on that. And then you find a new thing and you’re like, no, this is what interests me most now. And that becomes an endless cycle.
If you find yourself stuck in one of those, you are gonna have to draw the line somewhere.
Bunny: Or just write an anthology.
Oren: But usually, you will be best served by figuring out what is the most important thing to you and focusing on that. And often it will mean more rewrites.
But not always. I’ve worked with clients who sometimes have things that are surprisingly easy to take out that are not related to their darlings, and they only have in there because they felt obligated to have them in there. There is a lot of weird writing advice out there. People put in stuff that they were told they needed, that they did not need. It happens all the time.
Fight scenes are probably the number one culprit here. People feel like they need something exciting, so they put in a fight scene even though they don’t like fight scenes and don’t want them. And the fight scene is bad and doesn’t fit with the rest of the story. And it’s like, you don’t need it. We can get it outta here. That’s not your darling. Get rid of it.
Bunny: Romance is another one of those. I think more commonly in movies than in written work. There’s a woman and a man on screen, I guess they’ll kiss now.
Oren: That one’s a little more complicated. Cause movie writers do that because they have all kinds of marketing concerns. I don’t know if romance actually helps with that, but they seem to think it does.
I haven’t yet encountered many authors who include romance just because they feel like they should, but it does happen.
Chris: I definitely have heard from people who feel pressure to include romance when they’re not interested, but how many of them actually do it? I don’t feel like I’ve had a lot of clients where you ask them about like, Hey, this romance is kind of neglected. Is this actually what you want? Sometimes a client will say no.
But other times I’ve also had a client decide, actually, you know what? I do want it and go back and forth. So, I wouldn’t say that there’s a continuous pattern of that happening.
Bunny: I wonder if part of it is also not just who’s writing it, but also the medium itself. In a movie that might be two scenes, but scenes in a book are much longer, right? They take a lot more writing into it.
Chris: I will say that novels are longer stories than a movie is. If you’re having a romance subplot or something that’s gonna require more development or it just won’t feel very present in the story.
Oren: My impression from working with authors compared to what I see when I read about screenwriters, when they tell us how they do things, is that authors, while they are vulnerable to pressure, they are less vulnerable specifically to the idea that you should introduce something because it will make the book sell better.
Screenwriters do that all the time because they have very powerful financial incentives. Often they are told to do it by their boss. Most authors don’t have a boss and writing is so hard and the chances they’re ever gonna make money from these books is pretty low anyway. So, they don’t necessarily have the same pressure of like, you should include a hot naked scene ccause people like that. Sex sells. Authors are less likely to do that.
They’re more likely to do, you should include this weird villain POV sequence because it will make the book better. And some writing advice author that you trust told you to do that. They’re less likely to be motivated by what they think will make the book sell.
Chris: Or good, serious books are all about character flaws. Being self-conscious about how legitimate you are is definitely something that writers have an issue with sometimes, but the financial pressures less so.
Oren: Yeah. I’m not saying that authors are less likely to compromise their story for pressure. I just think they do it for different reasons.
Chris: The thing that I do find—besides outside pressure with clients—is that one of the biggest things that obstructs them understanding what their darling is, is the decisions they have already made in their head.
They decided at some point that this was the most important character. And trying to get them to reevaluate and pay attention to how they actually feel instead of what they previously decided can be really difficult.
We can often tell who the writer likes the most just by reading the story. Granted, if what they like changed, maybe when they wrote it, they really liked that character and we see that on the page and it’s different now. That can happen. But there’s many cases where I can just tell by looking at the manuscript where their energy is going.
But trying to get them to veer away from their preconceived notion of what was supposed to be important in their story towards what will actually be exciting for them can be a little difficult sometimes.
Bunny: Part of that’s definitely sunk cost. If they’re coming to you with a brainstorming document, that’s a lot different than if they’ve written eight chapters already. But I know I would be pretty resistant if I had written eight chapters and someone was like, this is about the wrong thing. And I’m like, damn it, you’re right.
Chris: In that case, when it’s a lot more work, it’s always up to the client how much work they wanna take on. And sometimes we might give them a direction that is technically a lot of work, but if they like the darling enough, they’re excited about the direction enough that they don’t mind.
And again, it varies from person to person, but we can certainly talk to them and ask them how much work they’re up for. Sometimes they would prefer just to cut the darling and call it done. Depends on where they’re at.
Oren: So, the question of course becomes: How do you identify your darling? That’s sort of the whole purpose here, trying to figure out what is the most important thing to you, and then you can work on making it the center of your story.
Bunny: It’s Wendy, right?
Oren: Always! Any character named Wendy automatically.
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: My clients do a very simple exercise where I have them rank things like characters or plot lines or setting elements in order of like, which you would be willing to cut first to last?
This is something you can do at home. Get a list, get all of your characters, write down all of your plot lines, all of your speculative elements. Which of these would I cut last if someone held a gun to my head? You might just be able to figure it out that way.
Bunny: You thought you were sniping the darling. It’s the darling sniping!
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: And this isn’t perfect. I’ve had a few people who, when they’ve ranked this, the ranking is not what I would’ve expected from reading the manuscript. Because again, like we kind of make our guesses based on where they put the most detail, the most emphasis, the most passion. I don’t wanna come back and tell them, no, your darlings are wrong. Or like, are you sure it’s not this one?
Chris: [laughs] I did have one client. His passion was so obvious that I finally just asked him point blank, why didn’t you make this other character your main character? Because he was not very familiar with writing speculative fiction, and so the idea of making a non-human was something that he had automatically discounted, and so there was something blocking him there.
That was a time when the discrepancy was so large and noticeable that I finally just felt necessary to ask him point blank. Otherwise, in many cases we might just take their word for it.
Oren: I’ve occasionally had to use subtle questions to try to be like, you list the characters in this order, that’s roughly equivalent to how much screen time they get. But I’m looking for which of them is the most important to you.
Sometimes the client will have one really interesting or really noticeable world building element that has lots of details and they won’t mention it high on their list. So I’ll ask them like, Hey, so you put a lot of detail into this, but you didn’t list it super high as a priority. What was the process there? And then we can often discover that they’re like, ah, actually that is really important to me. I don’t wanna get rid of that.
Chris: Again, the ways that we can tell often: something is really detailed, it’s very well developed, that shows that they’ve thought about it a lot.
Anything that is particularly unique is a sign. If a lot of things about their world feel fairly typical for their sub-genre, but then there’s this one thing that’s very different, that’s definitely a sign that that’s something that they’re interested in.
Something, as I mentioned earlier, that has an outsized presence in the story compared to the role it plays. That’s a sign that the writer just wants to include it. Unfortunately, that also means there’s a conflict there.
A character that has candy, of course, can be a sign. Although I’ve had other situations where a character had lots of candy and I thought that the writer really liked them, but it turned out there was something else going on. In which case they were wanting to get the readers to like that character, to kill them later or something like that. That can also happen.
Those are the general signs we look for, and if you have a reader, ask them what they think fits that picture.
Bunny: Worth clarifying that a darling could be any number of things. It might be a character, but it could also be a location or an element of their world building. [Brandon] Sanderson loves him some magic systems. Those are definitely his darlings. It’s not necessarily any one thing, it’s just an element of the story that you’re super invested in.
Chris: Or a theme or aesthetic or a message. Absolutely anything.
Oren: Yeah. Or activities. Are your tea parties being pushed out because there are these fight scenes you don’t care about? That’s a pretty good sign that you’re interested in tea parties.
Bunny: Yeah, it would’ve felt pretty dissonant if the Tea Dragon Society had also featured Fast and the Furious action scenes.
Oren: [laughs] You occasionally will encounter competing darlings. You want a cool action story, but you also want the message of the story to be that violence never solves anything.
Chris: [laughs] Rude of you to talk about Wings of Fire this way.
Oren: Look, it’s not just Wings of Fire, all right? There’s so many.
Chris: I’m sure it’s absolutely not just Wings of Fire that does that particular combination.
Oren: That one is definitely a thing that I’ve seen before In situations like that, yeah, probably can’t have both.
Chris: To be clear, I’ve seen some authors recommend combining darlings. It’s like, oh, if you have two things you’re excited about in one story, that’s even better. Sometimes it is. I won’t say it can’t work. If those darlings do truly get along, it can be great. They can clash in some way, and then what are you gonna do at that point? The better your knowledge is of storytelling and how everything fits together, the more that you can do something like that. And actually assess, okay, are these gonna compete with each other in some way or not? It’s certainly safer to have like, no, this is my darling for this story. My only darling in this story. This is the thing I’m gonna care about. Everything else is gonna be built around that one thing.
Oren: There are some darlings that are gonna be more difficult than others. My darling is that I want my character to have a peaceful life with no problems.
Bunny: What if they had a couple problems? You know?
Oren: Here’s an idea: Can other people have problems that your main character cares about? Technically, they don’t have any problems. There is a problem in the next area code that they are going to go help with.
Chris: [laughs] I will say if you’re trying to do something particularly tricky, that’s a reason to not add more darlings to the story. If your goal is to have a villain protagonist, please don’t try for any other ambitions in this story. All of your energy is gonna need to go into trying to pull off your villain protagonist.
Oren: The candied trickster is another one that authors often really love and is often really bad for the story.
Chris: Yeah, and that one’s hard because the appeal of the candied trickster is that they are not the main character. You can settle for a lesser version where it’s a little less candied and have a trickster. Otherwise, you can’t really do that one.
Oren: What I usually recommend in that situation, cause this has come up enough times that I have a plan for it, is I recommend making the trickster more mysterious.
Because what makes this trickster character so irritating is when they show up and get the better of the hero and then like do a victory lap about it and they’re like, nah, nah, nah, I got you. That sort of thing can be very irritating.
Chris: But Oren, isn’t it so clever? If the dog is really the mastermind, will that just blow everybody’s minds?
Oren: Eh…
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: So I recommend they can make this more mysterious so that it feels like the reader is being taunted or make them more directly antagonistic so that there is more of like an understanding that yeah, okay, we’re having to eat it now, but we’re gonna get that guy. And then you get that guy.
Chris: I have now recognized more situations in which the villain actually has too much candy, which is harder to pull off because villains are supposed to be more impressive than your protagonist to provide threat. But I have seen it.
If you see the protagonist suddenly become incompetent and not know what to say, just so that the villain can get in that last word while the protagonist just sits there and stares. That’s how you know the villain has too much candy.
And so, my question in that situation is again, whether the writer is really ready to have that character, they like be beaten, like really beaten and not just like, you thought you got me, but uh, nevermind you didn’t.And then like right off into the sunset or something.
Oren: So, I’ve got a case study. The case study is the Ministry of Time.
Chris: No!
Oren: Yes! Yeeeees! [laughs]
Bunny: As I was telling you before the podcast, this is one of few books that have drilled their way through my skull.
Oren: That’s good, right? That’s the book’s goal is to make you not stop thinking about it.
Bunny: [laughs]
Oren: In the same way you won’t stop thinking about a car wreck you were in.
Bunny: [laughs]
Oren: Okay, so first: spoilers for this novel, the Ministry of Time.
And I’m not gonna get into everything that’s wrong with it. Suffice to say I did not enjoy it. But the main thing that is very noticeable is that it really feels like there are a bunch of things in there that the author does not particularly care about.
In particular, the spy stuff and the bad guys from the future. I don’t think the author really cares about them.
Bunny: They’re barely in it.
Oren: They’re barely in it, and their presence is really vestigial. When they do show up, they don’t stick around much and the scenes they’re in are like really clipped.
Chris: I think it’s worth telling people just what the premise of this book is. The main character works for a ministry, it has time travel.
Bunny: A ministry of time.
Chris: Her job is to be what’s called a bridge, which basically means somebody was pulled from the past and she’s his roommate. Her job is to help him adjust and give him information. And doesn’t have a very big role, that’s in a good position to save the day if action happens.
Oren: The first-person narrator will lecture herself about the choices she should have made differently, but none of it matters cause she doesn’t have any choices to make.
Bunny: She’ll do something stupid or innocuous and then she’ll be like, you have to understand, I was stupid for doing that. I’m so sorry. And then transition to the next scene and it’s so jarring.
Oren: She has no agency, which means her bad decisions don’t make a difference either. There is nothing she could have done in this entire story with the information she had available that would’ve changed the outcome.
Bunny: But what if she told him about Pearl Harbor instead of the Holocaust? Was it Pearl Harbor? I forget.
Oren: it was nine 11, which is a whole thing.
But yes, if she had Rube Goldberg future sensing powers, that could have changed things. If she could do that, we would be having a different conversation.
If this was a client story, I would of course ask, and I can’t ask the author. I’m not gonna go to them and be like, Hey, I didn’t like your book. What were you trying to do with it?
Chris: [laughs]
Bunny: Justify your book to me!
Oren: So instead, I’m gonna guess based on the things that get the most attention. And I’m gonna guess that the things the author cares about the most are the romance between the main character and Gram, who is the time traveling guy that she’s roommates with.
Chris: I don’t think she cares about the romance. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.
Oren: It’s bad, but I think she does. I’m not saying it’s a good romance, Chris. I’m just saying I think she cares about it.
Chris: There is so little energy put into this romance.
Oren: Well, this is my case study, so we’re gonna have to assume this for now.
Chris: [laughs]
Bunny: It does kind of feel like an obligatory romance. Of course we’re gonna have a romance, but I think she does not think it’s obligatory.
Chris: I think she likes the different perspectives of looking at history in different ways, right. Or different perspectives from different people in history and their different ways of looking at the world.
Bunny: I kind of wonder if when she was plotting out the story, this was what she thought of as the most interesting way to take the characters’ relationship. She thought just friendship was less interesting. Which is a problem because you could do a lot of interesting things with friendship. But it does kind of feel like, where’s the most cool place I can take this? Well, obviously it’s romance, which is the end point of all relationships. It’s the ultimate relationship.
Chris: I mean, it’s possible she likes the romance, but she was afraid to write it because it wouldn’t be literary enough.
Oren: For the record: you stopped reading at a certain point, which I don’t blame you.
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: Shortly after that, they start having a lot of sex and it is described in a lot more detail than you would expect based on how summarized everything is.
Chris: Okay, but to [be] clear, I got through the majority of the book.
Oren: I’m not saying it’s a good romance. I just think that with the amount of time it takes up, I do think that it’s probably important.
Bunny: Look, we’ve gotta know how good at sex he is.
Oren: He’s very good. He’s so good that she interrogates him about it at one point. Like, how can you be this good at sex?
The other two things that seem important, because again, these get front and center portrayals, are the different perspectives of characters from different points in history. Sometimes they’re humorous, sometimes they’re serious, sometimes they’re commentary on the present day, and she also clearly cares a lot about the main character’s experience as a mixed-race child of an immigrant mother. Those two things show evidence of passion, I would say more than the romance does.
Bunny: She cares about that last one so much that she apparently didn’t name her character because of it.
Oren: I don’t know why she didn’t name her character. The main character doesn’t get a name and I’m not interested in looking into why.
What I would wonder is assuming these are the darlings—cause again, if I actually asked her, we might get a different answer—But if we assume that’s what these are, can we make these work together?
I think we can. I think what we would want is we would wanna ditch all the spy stuff. I just cannot express how little that ends up mattering and how ancillary that all is.
Bunny: Most of the book is her hanging out with Graham in their little bungalow and she talks on the phone to the spy play sometimes. That’s about it.
Oren: What we would actually want, is we would want to keep this concept of these characters getting rescued from periods in time.
The main character, I would recommend having her be in charge of helping a group of them settle in, instead of just one person. That way we could have more reason for her to talk to the others. Cause it’s kind of weird how we have to make a special trip anytime we want to talk to one of the other time travelers.
And have her have to do things like make sure they get enough of a budget. From the ministry to have the things they need and keep them from being subjected to invasive experiments and things like that.
And this gives us plenty of opportunity to highlight the connection and the similarities between the main character. I’ll call her Bridget; cause bridge is her job.
Chris & Bunny: [laughs]
Oren: Between her experience of growing up as a mixed-race child in place where there’s a lot of racism and the problems that these time traveling characters are experiencing is also, you know, not really belonging to any single place.
Bunny: Can I just say though, it’s the boringest thing, which the book does multiple times to have a time traveling character notice problems with the present world and be like, actually, you’re as bad as us.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, admittedly I did bristle a bit at that. I know how terrible the time period you came from was so, you know, don’t throw stones.
Bunny: Makes you think don’t-it?
Oren: Again, I’m trying not to base this on my personal tastes. I’m trying to figure out what the best way to make these things work together would be.
In this scenario, we might need to delay the romance a little bit because we wouldn’t want them to be dating if Bridget has a more official position in charge, but that could be changed by the end. Like they could have romantic tension and then the situation could change and then they had more easily act on.
Bunny: It would’ve been a better book.
Oren: So anyway, that’s the sort of thing I would recommend to a client. Again, it might turn out that I have completely misread everything. Maybe the romance isn’t important. I get why Chris is saying that.
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: maybe the spy stuff, despite barely being in the story is the actual darling. We’d have to make different recommendations based on that. But those are my guesses. Just looking at what is actually present in the story and how much attention it gets.
Bunny: I mean, those seem like fair diagnoses. If they were trying to do the spy thing, they should have left the bungalow more often.
Oren: Yeah, they should have maybe done some spy stuff sometimes is just my thought.
Bunny: They should have spied on some people maybe.
Oren: Well, with that, I think we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Bunny: And I can continue stewing with ministry sitting in my skull next to Epic the Musical and The Sleepless.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go up patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[outro music]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.