The first time I read the phrase "kill your darlings" was while reading Stephen King's book On Writing. It seems simple and reasonable. But after NaNo, I've started the task of trimming the overgrown garden, and now I'm struggling with what to keep, and what to prune away.
For instance, the story didn't go the direction I initially planned, but my manifesto didn't allow for second guessing and since I was writing pretty much by the seat of my pants, I simply wrote what made sense at the time. And I got some good ideas out of it, but my one book is quickly growing and dividing. I've lost the whole sense of the story and have started considering plot lines that frankly annoy me in order to make the pieces fit.
The other option is to rewrite it all as I had initially intended, killing most of what I've written. Not a nice thought. At all. Amalgamating the two isn't possible without resorting to annoying plot lines.
I've decided to give it a rest for a while, just to let the story simmer in my mind over the holidays and pick up again in 2014. Maybe a bit of distance will lend perspective. Or I'll have a sudden "Aha" moment and kill half my characters with a bomb, i.e. The Stand.
And it may be that I took on more of a story than I can properly manage right now. Too many threads to weave, too much to take into account. I did the same thing with my graduate thesis. Overplanned, tried to stuff too much into a relatively small space.
I have what I submitted to NaNo this year, in case I have to do an emergency resuscitation. And just in case, I might tie the dead darlings' shoe laces together in case of zombie novel apocalypse.
