One of the few soothing reminders that reliably warp my writer’s block from a brick wall into a magically traversable barrier (like the one at platform nine and three-quarters) is that writing and deleting aren’t two separate activities. They’re two sides of the same coin.
Writing is deleting, and deleting is writing.
Here’s how it works. Suppose I’m happily scribbling away at a story or article. I’m feeling excited, my fingertips click-dance across the keyboard, and my mind steadily supplies new words and ideas. But then, suddenly, I run out of things to say. My excitement plummets. The cursor blinks aggressively in its resting position.
Before I know it, I’m blocked.
This standstill can quickly turn into a vicious cycle where the frustration I associate with the empty page and the blinking cursor gets so intense that I stop showing up in the first place. Soon, the mere thought of writing feels like running against a glass door.
In the past, I always thought I needed to push through my writer’s block, find a hammer, and smash the glass door into shards. And yes, sometimes that helps. But more often than not, I’ve found that my writer’s block arose because I clung too tightly to what I wrote. That is, I ran out of things to say because I wasn’t saying what I actually wanted to say.
It’s usually at this point that I need to stop writing and start deleting.
To be clear, when I say deleting, I don’t mean to bulldoze everything I’ve written. Instead, it’s about regaining my bearings. What do I really want to say here? What serves the piece, what doesn’t? Which details are self-indulgent and which ones enrich the story?
Sometimes that’s only one word.
Often it’s several paragraphs or even pages.
Then, I write some more. I try different stories, different styles, different angles. Then, I delete them again. And again and again, until I write something that clicks into place like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
All this talk about deleting may sound depressing. And often, it is, initially, at least. However, the mindset shift here is that deleting is just another form of writing. Deleted words make room for new words, new perspectives.
I think every writer must go through this process in one way or another. Whether it’s writing a shitty first draft, filtering ideas, or shredding an entire manuscript, you can’t skip the deleting. Some words must get onto the page for the sole reason that they must go again. They help you figure out what you don’t want to say, so you can say what you actually want to say.
If writing is a form of thinking, deleting is a form of clarifying.
For example, when I began writing this piece, I tried to introduce the idea by the metaphor of breathing. I was trying to say that deleting relates to writing like exhaling relates to inhaling. It seemed like a nice metaphor at first, but then it got weird. Since we inhale as much as we exhale, it suggested that you need to delete as much as you write, which is illogical.
That’s when I got stuck.
So I started deleting. I deleted three precious paragraphs about breathing, oxygen supplies, and scuba diving, including a quote from a scuba diving coach who said that “the most frequent issue is breathing too fast and/or taking in too much volume.” It was painful. But I kept deleting. And then, magically, just like running through the brick wall at platform nine and three-quarters, the block dissolved.
Fresh words sprang onto the page.
One of the reasons I’m writing all this is to tie up loose ends.
When I started taking writing seriously in my early twenties, the first writing guide I picked up was Stephen King’s On Writing. One of the lines that stuck most with me, and arguably one of the most quoted pieces of writing advice, is this: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
I wanted to incorporate the advice. I really did. But it always seemed so cruel to me. Almost like giving birth to a baby and then chopping off one of its limbs or, in particularly grave cases, its head. I’ve got to hand it King: he stays true to his horror genre even when peddling writing advice.
The problem is, I’m a highly sensitive writer. I’ll faint when I see my letters bleeding ink.
In the end, it was about that particular turn of phrase for me: Seeing writing as deleting, or rather, deleting as writing. This flipped the ‘kill your darlings’ advice on its head while preserving its essence. When I delete, I’m not really killing the darling. It’s more like trimming the dead leaves from a tender plant to encourage new shoots to grow. Killing the darling, in this sense, is the precondition to give birth to new darlings.
Can I tell you a secret? Just between the two of us?
Let me tell you over here.
In the dark.
The trick is to not actually delete my darlings but to cut-and-copy them into a different document. That makes the deletion process a lot less scary while still making room for new ideas. All my darlings are safe in that extra document (but don’t tell that to King).
Then again, I’ve never opened that extra document again, let alone recycled my deleted darlings. Ever. After all, they were the very reason that enabled me to keep writing.
Cemetery of deleted darlings
squeeze words out of my mind like pus out of a pimple.
Inhale: write. Exhale: delete.
If I end up deleting everything except the headline, that’s a telltale sign that I haven’t found the right angle to access the idea.
To stretch the metaphor, I confused a glass door with a large window. There was something worth seeing on the other side but not worth visiting.