
Killer of darlings, City College, 1973.
Writers know "Kill your darlings." It means no matter how much you love a sentence, character, or plotline, if it interferes with a story's coherence or pace, cut it.
I've been keeping a file of murdered darlings that I've cut from a book I've been working on about Observation Post, a radical student newspaper at the City College of New York in the 1970s. Here are 10, chosen at random (some of which ended up in a different form in a different part of the book):
His cousin was Dylanologist A.J. Weberman.
"Reviews are the easiest thing to write," he said. "It's always easier to criticize somebody's else's work than to write your own."
The great basketball scandal of 1950, when CCNY won both the NCAA and NIT tournaments, and was then accused of fixing games for the Mob, was the only story I'd heard about the college.
He seemed to have a passing familiarity with what others perceived as reality and aspired to place his artwork in Screw.
Almost as amusing was a story about the college hiring Dr. Martin Bormann to fill the newly created post of Deputy Assistant Under Dean for Student Development and Enlightenment.
The "experimental college" within City College was offering a class in how to roll joints.
Fuck the Government and Fuck Nixon were our unifying themes.
"The first guy to pick up The Paper* each week is an agent for the CIA and FBI," he said. "They got a file on every member of The Paper."
He broke open hydrometers, drained the mercury, and stored it in little glass vials. "I love liquid metal," he said, pouring a few drops into the palm of his hand and watching the tiny silver blobs squirt around as if they were alive.
His room looked like an ammo dump—one so aesthetically flawless it could have been featured in Martha Stewart Living.
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*The Paper was the Black and Puerto Rican student newspaper.
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