Kill Your Darlings

In fiction writing classes, critiquing stories means giving people the hard truth about what works and what doesn't. "Rules" don't work very well for fiction. There's the "gosling rule," which says that the first person you meet in a story should be the main character. But some really good stories don't follow that; the gosling rule just happens to work well most of the time. That's the tricky part about writing fiction: finding what works.

The author usually isn't very good at determining what works. In fact, sometimes a particular paragraph or phrase or idea seems brilliant and necessary--but it doesn't work in the story. I've had an idea for a story that's evolved so that when I start writing the story the inspirational idea is a clunky addition. If I force it in, someone needs to tell me to take it out.

Those are the changes that are the hardest to make. "Kill your darlings," they say. It's painful, but your story is much better for it.

Well, when I drafted a script for the Crest commercial Ben and I made, the slogan was "People buying Crest is not like Crest." Toothpaste comes out a tube and won't go back in. People buying toothpaste, on the other hand, are free to return it. So I had in mind juxtaposing shots of a guy trying to make toothpaste go back in the tube with the shots about the craziness of the video. But that made the video even more difficult to understand, because you had to infer what about people buying Crest was not like Crest and how that mattered. We filmed it, strung all the scenes together, and it didn't work.

Ben broke the news to me that we had to change it. And so we killed my darling toothpaste squeezing scene and the commercial was better for it.

But I still like the scene so much that I'm resurrecting it so everyone can enjoy Dan making a mess on Julie Vaiarella's table. AGHHH!