A Graveyard of Great Ideas
On learning to love to kill what you love
In the 1980s, graffiti made the jump from subway cars to gallery spaces and critical acclaim, thanks in part to Michel Basquiat. We now call it “street art” (which actually has more in common with murals than gallery paintings), a welcomed part of our shared culture, like “street food.” But there’s a difference between the scrawled tag and a multi-layered piece. One is not worth risking a vandalism charge over; the other took time to do.
The Ten-Hour Drawing
I had a teacher in high school who used to stress the importance of spending at least ten hours on a drawing. If you weren’t putting in at least ten, it wasn’t worth sharing. We’d pin our assignments to the wall, and Mr. J would walk around, often stopping to squint at a piece that needed more definition or shading, and he’d point that chin at the group and shake his big bald head and ask who would dare hang something like that on his wall. “This isn’t a ten-hour drawing!” he would yell. The culprit would try to pretend he was invisible.
The longer you spend making something, seeing where it goes, the more you get to understand that beginnings often get buried. This goes for drawing, painting and writing (just ask the poet Frank O’Hara why he isn’t a painter). Writers know that sometimes you spend hours on something that you can’t even use. Sometimes you have to commit the unthinkable. You have to “kill your darlings.”
Like a lot of great quotes, this one is often attributed to Oscar Wilde, but it could have easily been Faulkner or Ginsberg. It sounds like something they would say. It’s actually from a 1914 Cambridge lecture “On Style” by Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose advice for his audience was: “murder your darlings.”
This warning against “extraneous ornament” has been with us for quite a while. It’s also practical rule that many young writers should remember. Don’t become enamored with something just because you wrote it.
I recently took up the piano, and sometimes I’ll find a little chord progression that surprises me. I want to use it in a song because I’m impressed with the fact that I can play the piano at all. And this is what happens to a lot of new writers. It’s the equivalent of being bewildered by your own bellybutton—or staring at the palm of your hand—it’s so weird if you actually look at it. I mean, dude. Really. Hands are amazing.
Pro-tip: don’t fall in love
When I was a film student, I learned the antiquated art of cutting 16mm film on a Steenbeck, a WWII-era piece of machinery, built to last (this was the nineties, and computer editing was in the early stages). You’d hang your clips on a rack that stood next to the editing table, occasionally leaning over to look at the strips of film to see if there was some frame or sequence you could use.
If you know how much work goes into renting equipment, enlisting the help of your friends, not to mention how expensive film is to develop—you can imagine how hard it was to throw away a shot that was well-lit, well-framed and in focus. Sadly, the ratio of cut material to used footage is about 70/30. Industry standard, I’m afraid. And sometimes what we thought was our best work winds up on the cutting room floor.
If you’re like me, it’s easier to cut something knowing it has a place to go besides the trash. So don’t throw it all away! Maybe you can learn to love again. Start a file of odds and ends, a graveyard of zombie ideas. Hold onto those finely honed paragraphs, those scenes you rewrote a dozen times, those sentences you lost sleep over, the ones you got rid of when you sobered up and realized they were slowing down the narrative or not serving the drama.
Be ruthless, go for concision, and don’t despair. Maybe one day these darlings will rise from the grave and go limping off in search of fresh brain.
Prompt: Start a file of odds and ends. Call it Future Zombies or The Graveyard or Cutting Room Floor. Now start filling that file with paragraphs that don’t fit into the final piece you’re writing. *If you already have a file like this, maybe now is a good time to open it up and read through it. Are there some zombies in there that crave brain? Maybe it’s time for them to rise from their graves. Maybe this is Thriller night!