Die! Die! My Darling!

When you’re a writer, they’ll tell you that you’ve got to kill your darlings. Those four paragraphs about the hero’s car? Ditch it. That three page description of the heroine’s breats? Into the shitcan!

This can be very tough to hear sometimes, but if you’re smart you’ll take your medicine and cut out all that succulent fat. And as an example, here’s the (former) opening page and a half of my latest story, “Where There’s Smoke”.

Shreveport was founded by lazy people.

Well, that’s not quite fair. The men who looked at a small trading post in northwest Louisiana and said, “Here we shall make our names,” who in the year after the Alamo laid out streets with names like Crockett and Travis, who took a muddy road running due west from the banks of the Red River and named it Texas, these were men of industry, of vision.

But the people who settled here, who beat their way through the wilderness from Tennessee or Mississippi hoping for a new life, who then stopped at the first sign of civilization and said, “You know, this is far enough”, they were the lazy ones.

Lazy or not, in the years after the Civil War the riverboat trade grew and grew, and a bustling waterfront sprang up to meet it. Soon Shreveport stretched inland, producing such refinements as an opera house, a public garden, and a flourishing red-light district.

Then the railroad came through, and the riverfront became the business district, big brick warehouses transformed into offices and restaurants. Years passed, business moved to the new ten-story skyscrapers on Market street, and the area now called Shreve Square became the home of bars and lunchrooms, and Negro speakeasiers where Huddie Ledbetter and Robert Johnson sang and played guitar. A brief revival as an entertainment district only put off the inevitable, as the old buildings slowly wore away, hunching down on their crumbling mortar. A tornado tore through a few years later, reducing many of the old soldiers to heaps of rubble.

Then riverboat gambling came to town. Suddenly Shreve Square was hot hot hot, with new bars, new restaurants, even new drunks passed out under the Red River bridge.

I *sob* love that stuff! But EVERyone I showed it to said that it was the wrong opening. Now I have to condense it down to three quick paragraphs and wrap it with some actual, you know, action and dialog.

Still, it cries out - Weep for me!