Kill The Robins

Today I am revising a fiction story for my writing class. It is very frustrating.I am writing a coming of age piece about a teenage boy and his over-protective mother. In the original piece I wove a side-story in about a mother robin and her nest of babies. The more I wrote about the robins, the more I fell in love with them. They became my favorite characters and it shows in the story. One problem-- the robins took away from the main story and my professor was quick to point that out to me in his critique.

He wrote, "Although the robin's story is beautifully written and inventive, it takes us away from the true drama between the mother and son and it's also a bit heavy-handed in its symbolic presence."

His advice - kill the robins. Eliminate them from the story. Ouch.

So today I am trying to do that. It is very difficult to hit the delete button, to erase paragraph after paragraph of finished script--words I have labored over and spent hours getting just right. By removing the robins, I am basically starting over and at this point I'm not sure I even like the story anymore.

Hearing a hard truth can be difficult. Even painful.

Today that hard truth was about my writing, but tomorrow it might be about my parenting, or my faith walk, or my friendships.

I am committed to being a better writer and today that meant facing a hard truth.

Do you have any robins you need to kill?

Note: This is from my archives, but as I am currently working on a novel, I am constantly having to edit, revise and kill the robins.