Killing Your Darlings

Susan Rogers Cooper

You may have heard the instruction to beginning writers, 'Kill your darlings,' meaning if you like a phrase or passage too much, your readers won't react well to such self-indulgence. Today's famous author gives the words an entirely new meaning.

Susan Rogers Cooper is one-half fifth-generation Texan and half-Yankee, but the Texas side seems to be winning. She is the author of two dozen books: twelve books in the Milt Kovak series, ten in the E.J. Pugh series, and two books in the Kimmey Kruse series. Susan lives in the Austin area and is the grandmother of three precocious children.

And now, as promised…

Killing Your Darlings

by Susan Rogers Cooper

The year was 1983 and my family had just moved to Austin, Texas. I was still buzzing from my first fiction sale – a romance sold to a company called Listen to Love, romance novels on audio-cassette (it went belly-up within a year, although my $100 check did clear).

I saw an ad for story submissions to a prestigious local anthology and reworked a short story I'd already written. The submission criteria was several hundred words less than the story I'd written, so I went about dealing with that. In the story, my angst-ridden main character, going through a mid-life crisis, goes into her attic and finds a box from her teen years, full of Ricky Nelson 45s and other memorabilia of the artist, all based on my own pre-teen fixation with all things Ricky. I tore out the scene – mindlessly and with great aplomb. The story was submitted and bought and I was thrilled. One month later Rick Nelson died in a plane crash.

I'd always heard the expression “killing your darlings,” but I thought it was figurative, not literal. So this is my confession, such as it is. And, by the way, the prestigious local anthology – having been in business for over ten years before my submission – also went belly-up immediately after that year's publication, and I never got the fifty bucks I'd been promised.

In 1987, I decided to write a mystery, which I did, and sent it off to various over-the-transom houses. After the third devastating rejection, I decided on a new mental approach. Instead of “getting published,” my new goal would be to paper the downstairs half-bath with rejection letter wall paper. I only got part of one wall done. Since that time I've had close to thirty books published and, as of this writing, I've not killed anyone else – except on paper – no more publishing venues have gone belly-up on my behalf, and I've been able to tear down the half-finished wall paper in the downstairs bath.

It's the little things that make a career, right?