A Graveyard for My Darlings

Santa Ifigenia Cemetery, Santiago de Cuba. SOURCE: Heraldo.es

“Murder your darlings” is perhaps the most disturbing advice proffered to newbie novelists. If you’re not in this illustrious category, you might be understandably befuddled. Basically, it means, don’t get too attached to anything you write — characters, storylines, highfalutin prose — because chances are you’ll have to cut it.

Luckily, I’m not far enough in my noveling venture to have many darlings to whack. But I’ve been warned that historical fiction writers are particularly susceptible to drowning their pages in facts no one but themselves finds interesting. So, I figure I can deal with this danger preemptively by starting a blog. With a repository for my darlings, my rationale goes, I will be less likely to include them in the novel when the time comes. 

A few details about the novel-to-be: it is set in 1896(ish) in Santiago de Cuba and is inspired by a century-old family mystery - my maternal grandmother’s abandonment as a toddler in a Havana hospital. She never learned who her mother was, but ten years after her death, we - her children and grandchildren - unraveled the mystery through DNA testing. The truth didn’t redeem her mother’s actions (more on that in future posts), but it did spark the premise of a story: how would my grandmother have processed the truth had she learned it as a young woman?      

So… Cuba, family, and the agonizing process of writing a novel will likely occupy most of this blog. I hope you’ll stick around!