: Re: Is it bad if I sidetrack to a backstory that’s not really necessary but is interesting? My story is about two children and one of them dies in the first chapter. I give a four page backstory

@Phylliss352

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The recommendation to remove something that's good in its own right, but doesn't belong in the broader context of a work, is usually phrased as "kill your darlings". While this is now a literary journal's name, it started when Arthur Quiller-Couch used a slightly different phrase in a 1916 lecture:

Style, for example, is not – can never be – extraneous Ornament. You
remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of
Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional
letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament,
wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels. Well, in
this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have
something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule
of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to
perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it –
wholeheartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscript to
press. Murder your darlings.'

In that original context it's clear he was worried mainly about highfalutin vocabulary... you know, like highfalutin. Today, the concern is more with scenes. In either case, it's worth archiving your darlings so you can rework some of them later. One reason I use a program called LyX to write is that I can hide anything in a note, so it doesn't persist in the output but I never have to delete it. Chapters' worth have been preserved for future reference that way. But yes, if a scene isn't necessary, lose it. If the information in the scene is necessary, find a way to work its introduction into something truly necessary, be it just when it's needed or sooner.

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