Episode 3.3 - Third Wheel

This episode is the third episode of the third season and it is titled Third Wheel with a threesome at the center of the plot. It’s too big of a coincidence, so I have to believe that the writers just fell in love with this idea.

But the episode mostly falls flat. It doesn’t push the story forward at all, and Ted doesn’t even actually tell us if he has the threesome in the end. (Maybe this is a matter of bowing to the standards department at CBS?)

So this episode - or the concept of it - is a Darling.

What’s a Darling? A Darling is a scene, a character, a line, whatever, that you, as the writer, are completely attached to but it doesn’t actually work in the story. “Kill your darlings” is writing advice that is often attributed to Stephen King or William Faulkner but some say goes back to the mid-1800s. In any case, it’s been around a long time and has been cited by some pretty prolific and successful authors.

Darlings can be like this episode and be a little bit awkward, a blip on the steady line of your story. But sometimes they can completely ruin your story. If you’re a fan of the show, you can probably name at least one or two other Darlings within the run of HIMYM; any TV show that runs for a long time has them. The production schedule is too fast for everything to be edited and polished to a perfect shine.

How do you know you have a darling? Here are a few ways I’ve identified them in my own writing:

• There’s a point in your story where your CPs/Beta Readers start suddenly criticizing little things. Up to this point, everything is fine, but after that break point, everything is just a little bit wrong.

• You’ve got a plot hole, and if you deleted a specific scene or line, you’d be able to fix it. Instead, you start brainstorming ways to force it to work.

• A scene has stayed the same through multiple drafts. No edits at all.

• A CP tells you to cut something and you get angry

Darlings, if they truly are Darlings, really do need to be killed. They’re too likely to bump your audience out of the story or force you into a storytelling corner that you can’t get out of.