It’s often heard advice in writing that you should kill your darlings. I don’t take this to mean you should kill your characters (although really, why not?). What I think this typically refers to is having the openness, the willingness, to cut pieces that you love in service of the greater story. You may have a line or a scene that you just love, that you think shows all your brilliance. But in the scheme of all things story, it doesn’t work. It slows things down, or takes the reader out of the story. Maybe it’s too shiny, or maybe it’s just irrelevant. You need to be willing to swallow your pride and kill the bit to make a better piece.
I was reminded recently that this holds true for web design. I’d built this tabbed navigational structure for a website that I really liked. I thought it was clever and useful and I spent a lot of time coding it. But come time for content to be loaded into the site, it just wasn’t working. I tried changing the design of it visually, but that didn’t fix the problem. The problem was that it was just slightly too different from the usual UI patterns. It was confusing. Ultimately, we cut it down into something that was more recognizable and standard.
I’m sorry I haven’t been blogging lately. Oddly, I blog less when business is slow. All my thinking time is devoted to how I am going to get work, get paid, and avoid destitution, rather than what I can blog about. Maslow’s hierarchy in action!
I’ve spent the last two weeks developing a new Clockpunk Studios website. When I’m burned out on staring at that, I switch over and learn CodeIgniter for developing apps. My brain is full of coding things right now, and not so much with the prose. I’m hoping that all this time and energy transfers over to a broader application of knowledge. The more I know about programming, perhaps the better I can write TAKEDOWN NOTICE. And if not, well, hopefully I’ve expanded my skillset with new ways to pay the bills. It’s win/win, really.
Tags: business, kill your darlings, My Writing, Web Design
