Problematic

A saying you hear often in screenwriting lectures is "Kill your darlings," a bit of advice I've heard over the years.  Now, in case you're confused, that's not a reference to what George R.R. Martin does in his novels (where he takes a character you've learned to love and he brutally cuts their throat) or what that lady in your building did when she drowned her kids in the tub that afternoon last February (after all, she caught the oldest whistling the theme to Harry Potter, and that . . . was . . . it).  No, "Kill your darlings" refers to editing your manuscript, revising your work-in-progress, and cutting scenes that you love and/or worked crazy-hard on.*

Sometimes a scene--no matter how proud you are of it--slows the pace, or confuses the narrative, or raises questions that are never answered, and they've got to go, for the good of the project as a whole.  And it can be painful, even heartbreaking, to lose those scenes, hence the Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Murder your darlings")/William Faulkner ("Kill all your darlings") phrase I'm bringing up.

I mention this because, in the home stretch of my novel "Balms & Sears," I recorded a chapter last night that seems to have been intended for the very end of the book (it refers to the climax, which I haven't gotten to yet, and as I was narrating it, I discovered, aside from it being out of place, that it is somewhat (or more than somewhat) problematic.

I don't know either.  But I like it.

Now, "problematic" is a term that has been kicked around so much recently that Big Anklevich and I have grown to despise it, because it can refer to whatever you (or a potential viewer/reader) don't or might not like.  A lot of the times, it's used to mean that something may or may not include sexist, racist, homophobic, bigoted, or closed-minded attitudes from the past, but also can just mean what it started out meaning: something causes a problem in the viewer, reader, or writer.

In my chapter's case, despite me making alterations so it takes place before the climax . . . it features a character doing something that, well, just might be too much.  I don't know, really.  I know that I wrote it around the time that, when I came to the library, I encountered a crazy person that called me "Lizardface" and freaked me out to the point where I thought . . . well, not exactly me at my most charitable.  So, I put it in the story.  The problem is, the scene makes one of the characters--a piece of work, sure--nasty in a potentially irredeemable way.  Since it's my book and I'm close to it, I can't say whether a reader would be alienated or irretrievably lost with that scene, but it's definitely possible.**

I remember a moment in the TV show "Angel" where a character did something that made me decide, "You know, this isn't something I can look past," and it really did taint the series (and character) for me until the end of time.  For thousands (if not millions) of people, when Luke Skywalker tossed away his father's lightsaber and/or milked a sea cow and drank its blue milk raw was an absolutely deal-breaking moment.  I recall people saying that, in comics, the moment where Hank Pym backhanded Janet, or the moment when Peter Parker traded his wife to the Devil to save Aunt May, or the moment when Cyclops left his wife and infant child because Jean was alive again (and then later cheated on Jean with Emma Frost) were irredeemable moments.  For me, there was a page in The Ultimates that not only made me despise Captain America . . . but never read an Ultimate Universe comic again.  And Alan Moore apparently meant what the Joker did in his Batman story "The Killing Joke" to be so egregious that the Dark Knight ends up killing the Joker.*** 

In "Balms & Sears," I wrote a character that (I think) is complicated, and presumably hard to like.  But I fear I may have gone too far, making a character that was meant to be anti-heroic into an absolutely loathe-able villain.  Not really my intention.

So, I guess I'm going to cut that bit out, despite me being absolutely loath to do so (my rewrites almost always include adding things, never subtracting things), and put it away, despite having already recorded it.  I'll have to rewrite a bit, unless I just cut the whole chapter out, but if it helps make the (potential) readers like the characters, then it's worth it.

Okay, on with the countdown (seven chapters to go).

*Or in my case, don't even remember writing, but by gum, they must be important because I spent time creating.

**I had a conversation--a truly vexing one--with a friend of mine recently, regarding the ending to a Lara & The Witch story, where he felt it was excessive or in poor taste.  I disagreed, but what he said stuck with me long enough that I did rewrite the ending, and I think the new ending is almost definitely better.

***It's told in such an oblique way, however, that DC simply let it go, as part of comic continuity, not realizing that that's what happened on that final page of the book.  Heck, I read it myself three times before ever hearing that interpretation . . . and between you and me, despite Brian Bolland's fantastic artwork, it's literally not there.