The Aspirational Self and Killing Your Darlings

When I was in graduate school, several of my classmates believed that, in order to be a good writer, you had to “kill your darlings.” In the parlance of journalists, this means being willing to part with that exquisite turn of phrase or perfectly chosen word in the service of making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The concept of killing your darlings apparently morphed out of a passage from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1916 work, On the Art of Writing:

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

I found myself thinking about that idea when I serendipitously came upon one of my favorite pieces by the gone, but not soon to be forgotten David Foster Wallace, on the site of protean blogger Andrew Sullivan last night. In the post, entitled “A Different Kind of Freedom,” Sullivan provides an excerpt of the graduation address Wallace delivered to the students at Kenyon College in 2005. It’s a wonderful piece of oratory that got me thinking about killing my darlings in a entirely different light. Like most people, I can live with – after a time – cutting words from a page. But I’m talking about the personal darlings: the things we want to desperately believe about ourselves, the things we want to be true, even when we know they’re not. I wonder how we live with ourselves when we have to kill those darlings.

I’m a social person and wonder why I want to be a writer. It’s among the most isolating professions, if not the most isolating. Certainly, a journalist has to engage with the world, observe it, and participate in it, but much of a writer’s work lies not in putting the metaphorical or literal pen to paper; rather, it comes through the thought process that leads to what one hopes is a cogent and convincing arrangement of words and ideas that may express some point of view in a visceral way or illuminate a great truth, previously undiscovered. But thinking is, largely, a solitary endeavor.

So, as I said, I often find myself thinking about why I want to write and inside those thoughts lay my darlings, snarling like a pack of rabid dogs. They gnaw and claw at me constantly.

Sometimes I think want to be rich, but what I really want is to live a comfortable life. I’m not sure what that means, but I know its one of my darlings. I think I had a comfortable life once, or at least an approximation of it. Prior to moving to New York, I had a respectable job working in non-profit management at a major, private university. The hours were agreeable. The pay was adequate. I could take a nice vacation here and there, buy a round or two at the bar, or indulge my music fetish with unnecessary downloads from the iTunes store. I liked it but don’t know if I loved it. It was safe. What I’m doing now is not. Wallace:

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

It is hard to keep that truth in your face in city that sells aspiration like a commodity. In the main, aspiration is admirable. Humans are, by nature, aspirational creatures. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to move up from your starting station in life. That notion is, in fact, what we call the American Dream (TM). It’s why our parents scrimp and save and defer their own happiness so that we, as their children, may know a life that’s just a little better than the one they’ve know. My parents did that for me and I’m sure the same could be said of many of you who will read this. I am grateful for their sacrifice, though I don’t always show it or even seem to accept it. Being out of work in one of the richest cities on the planet can do awful things to your self worth if you let it. I see myself falling prey to a well-known trap – tying my value to the amount of money in a bank account – and I don’t know how to stop it. I know I don’t want to live with the persistent fear of bouncing a check or being unable to save for my retirement because I didn’t have enough good ideas to pitch in a given month. Does wanting to make a lot of money make me a bad person or merely a person who might not be doing the thing he’s best suited for? I don’t know. Wallace again:

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

Do you consider yourself to be a good person? I know that I’d like to think that I am. However, I also know I’ve done things I’m not proud of, things that make me cringe when I even start to consider them. For example, try remembering the first time you convinced yourself that it was ok to be less than truthful to a person you cared about. If you’ve never done that, consider yourself a saint. For the rest of us, though, how did it make you feel? Were you taken aback by the ease of your mendacity…or were you seduced by the feeling and thrill of it? Do you even know why did you did it? Was it for expediency’s sake? Perhaps it was borne out of a momentary fit of pique? Maybe fear was the motivator? Whatever the reason, if you consider yourself a good person, you weren’t when you committed that act (or any similar subsequent acts). You let yourself down and in the end, that’s all you have.

Failing to be your best self inevitably leads to regret, which, sad to say, is a darling of mine. It seems an odd thing to hold on to for regret is perhaps the most crushing feeling there is because it comes with a sense of ownership. At some juncture, you were at least partially in control of the circumstances that led to the regrettable state. Regret sticks with us because it also creates a false sense of powerlessness. We reconstruct memories in ways that make us less culpable for our actions. We allow ourselves to think we’re at the mercy of others or circumstances rather than realize the active role we play in making our lives what we want them to be. I do this constantly and then wonder why things don’t look the way I want them to. In the wake of those delusional waves, we ask for forgiveness and absolution. Our deities grant these things by way of simple prayer or act of penance; people, however, are less charitable. You may not deserve to be forgiven or absovled (or if you are deserving, it may not happen when you want it to). Whispers heard by God are often shouts of desperation that fall on deaf ears in the realm of men.

The key for killing my darling of regret, then, is to focus on those things that Foster mentions: attention, awareness, discipline and caring and sacrificing for others. All of these things can be accomplished by getting out of your own way, which is probably one of the most important things you can ever learn. You can’t always pick yourself up, but you can pick up someone else. You can’t always make amends, but you can resolve to never make the same mistakes again (or at least learn from previous mistakes). Every day offers an opportunity to kill a darling. It’s painful. It makes you realize how far you have to go to be better than what you currently are. But it’s the only way you’ll get to where you need to be.