Stephen King’s 'kill your darlings' rule and the most terrifying Better Call Saul episode yet
And other stuff you'll love for the week of July 18
Stuff You’ll Love for the week of July 18…
Stephen King’s “kill your darlings” rule and the most terrifying Better Call Saul episode yet (WARNING: SPOILERS)
If you’ve ever read Stephen King’s On Writing, universally regarded as one of the best books ever on the craft of writing, you may know where I’m about to go with this.
One of King’s most important lessons in On Writing is about being willing to suppress ego and cut copy you’re in love with for the sake of pace. Twenty years after the book’s publishing, this lives on in writing circles as simply “Kill your darlings”:
Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings).
I’m bringing this up because the final season of Better Call Saul resumed last Monday with its most suspenseful episode to date. Many fans, including myself, were surprised at the writers’ decision to kill off charismatic cartel villain Lalo Salamanca, wrapping up his feud with Gus Fring despite five episodes still to go. It was also surprising how quickly Nacho, another fan favorite, was killed off earlier in this season.
But time and again, that’s the brilliance of this show. There are no sacred cows. There are no darlings. The best idea is the boss of the room, and that best idea is the one that keeps the story moving. Because there’s two more major storylines still to sew up here — not to mention the mecha-anticipated Walt and Jesse appearances, which apparently aren’t going to be one-off, fan-candy cameos.
This Rolling Stone Q&A with show writer Gordon Smith reveals a lot about the “kill your darlings” mindset. I’m pasting the portions that speak most to this, but you should read the whole thing.
A lot of people are going to be surprised Lalo died with so many episodes remaining in the season. Why did it happen now?
We had no interest in losing Tony Dalton, obviously. He’s incredible. He’s so much fun on set. We really didn’t want to lose the character, either. But we felt like we had set these forces in motion, and we were having these two titans of our story clash, and unfortunately, we knew Gus had to come out the other side. I suppose there was a world where Lalo limps away and Gus has to chase him down, but that felt like territory we’d already covered. We were happy to give him a big, big, big out. And he gets what he wants. He’s been searching since the end of Season Four for something he thought was going on. He was searching for Werner, chasing down all these leads. So we gave Lalo the gift of getting everything — his heart’s desire — and it destroys him.
It’s obvious you all enjoyed writing for Tony and this character. How much time did you spend over the last few seasons figuring out if there was a way for Lalo not to die, given what Gus does on Breaking Bad?
There was a little bit of time, especially because we wanted to make sure that Jimmy/Saul’s fear of him could live if he died. What we ended up coming up with was that Jimmy fears him a lot, and he’s not going to believe — unless he sees the body himself — that Lalo’s dead. The guy’s already risen from the dead, as far as he’s concerned. We were more concerned about making sure the fear lived on than the character. We would have loved to keep him around, but we also know that by the end of Breaking Bad, Gus says he has killed the last Salamanca. So one way or the other, they were all going out before Gus talks to Hector.
In that desert scene on Saul’s first episode of Breaking Bad, Saul seems genuinely relieved Lalo didn’t send Walt and Jesse. So he is still afraid the bogeyman is out there and coming for him?
Yes. I think that’s the idea. The last thing he says before that gag goes in [in this episode] is, “It wasn’t me, it was Ignacio!” And when the gag comes off [on Breaking Bad], that’s the first thing he says. So I think there’s some sense memory going on for Jimmy/Saul, and he’s never going to outrun that fear. No rational part of his mind or rational information is every going to make him feel anything other than that Lalo has sent something out there that might take a long time to come smashing into him.
At this stage of the writing process, how difficult has it been to balance the needs of the story you’re telling on this show about Jimmy and Kim with making sure things reconcile with what happens on Breaking Bad?
I’m not sure the difficulty has increased. It’s always been very difficult to figure out all the pieces and where they cram into one another. There’s certainly been the heightened awareness that we were ending and we wanted to land the plane as gracefully as we could. I’m probably forgetting pieces that were out there. We had three storylines, essentially, that all needed to come to crisis and conclusion, and hopefully we’ve brought some of them to crisis and conclusion.
You also wrote “Rock and Hard Place” this season, where Nacho, like Lalo, died earlier than many viewers expected. Were there discussions about keeping him around beyond that?
Nacho probably could have scrapped a little bit longer. But there’s that diminishing return of seeing him get out of scrapes. Vince directed that incredible sequence in Tom [Schnauz] and Ariel [Levine]’s episode of Nacho getting away from the Cousins when he’s trapped and almost certainly doomed at the hotel. And it’s like, how many times are you going to do that? It felt like we had to bring it to a crescendo, or else we were going to start treading water. It was a regrettable situation, because we liked having him as a character to play with in our toolbox, and we liked having Michael Mando on the show. But we felt it was better for the character to really take control in that moment and steer the course of his own destiny, rather than to just be chased out of existence.
The way this season has been building up, it feels like we’re at the final stretch of the 4x100 final at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and Bullet Bob Hayes just took the baton.
A. Sherrod Blakely on ex-gravedigger, ex-DoorDash driver, Celtics wonder Matt Ryan
When we last checked in with Celtics reserve Matt Ryan, he’d just gone from working at a cemetery and delivering for DoorDash, to being at the end of the bench for the NBA Finals a year later, in a journey everybody was rooting for.
Now, Ryan is having his day in the sun in the NBA Summer League. Veteran Celtics scribe A. Sherrod Blakely checks in with him, and it’s worth a read because of some of the emotional quotes he gets, and some fun marketing nuggets to keep an eye on (yes, he’s had talks with DoorDash about an endorsement deal).
My favorite thing about working with Blakely at NBC Sports Boston was his consistency. It is tough to be on TV as much as he was (pulling pre and post-game hits, as well as halftime appearances) and still file a column as soon as the game’s over. But he could give you clean copy seconds after the final buzzer and not even break a sweat. That’s an editor’s dream on deadline.
And when Blakely has a good story, he has a remarkable way of showing, not telling, staying the hell out of the way and letting the subject give you the good stuff.
AJ Dillon, confirmed still using the R3 stick
I went viral for this response to this video of Green Bay Packers star AJ Dillon having fun with a baseball mascot, and I’m reminded of his days at Lawrence Academy when he was a Bulldozer From Hell at tailback despite being one of the jolliest, most sincere, most jovial high school players I ever covered in my sportswriting career.
That sleigh ride in question came in a 55-30 whipping of Cheshire Academy that wasn’t as close as the score might suggest. AJ ran for 316 yards and five touchdowns in whatever direction he wanted; a decade later, it might be the most dominant rushing performance I’ve ever seen in a high school game in Massachusetts.1
I was in trouble that afternoon. Earlier in the week, I predicted a Cheshire win on account of a P5-caliber wide receiver that I didn’t think the Spartans could cover. Naturally, they erased him well.
The game got out of hand in the fourth. That’s when AJ and a few others came over to me on the sideline and put their arms on my shoulders, ready to give a good-natured ribbing. “How we feeling?” chuckled offensive lineman Eddy Fish, who’d join AJ at Boston College. We all shared some good laughs.
As I walked back to my car following post-game interviews, a fan stopped me in the parking lot. “He’s gotta be the best you’ve ever seen, right?!?” he asked emphatically.
As a journalist, you’re always fighting that urge to react in the moment. Calling everything your new “best [X] ever” gets old quick. So of course, I rattled off to the guy some others I’d seen that hold up — your Jordan Todman’s, your Isaac Johnson’s, your Jonathan Hernandez’s — but told him, yeah, hard not to love the kid, and hard not to say he’s up there with the best of them.
I guess this is the part where I disclose that my day job, Hudl, affords me the ability to go back and watch these old games again on archived film. Some nights I’ll just get totally lost in the sunken place. This is one game I’ll never get enough of on replays.
Time has a funny way of either emboldening your legacy or eroding it, which is to say now what I should’ve said a long time ago: AJ Dillon’s THE best running back I ever saw around these parts.
Some other Stuff You’ll Love
This story about the fake Indian cricket league that swindled Russian bettors out of $4,000 before getting shut down might be my favorite story of 2022 so far.
Sports Illustrated catches up with its greatest features writer ever, Gary Smith, who’s been enjoying retirement by teaching mindfulness to elementary school students in South Carolina. Gary’s one of the reasons I fell in love with sportswriting. He famously only wrote for the magazine four times a year, so when that SI came in the mailbox and you found a Gary byline, it was like Christmas. He’s written some of the most powerful profiles ever of some of the most iconic sports figures of our time, always exploring the soul of his subjects in ways others could never. But I always felt he was at his best when writing about high school athletes. Two recommended reads: “Shadow of a Nation,” about Native American high school hoops wizard Jonathan Takes Enemy; and “Out of the Shadows,” about Amherst’s own Jamila Wideman.
This rendering of Real Madrid’s renovated stadium is nuts. I’m guessing there will be some NFL games there in the future.
Maybe it’s because I’ve got a bit of a woodpecker problem in my backyard right now, but this piece in The Atlantic about how to successfully smash your head against a tree, like those annoying birds, is highly entertaining.
The Boston Globe profiled Molly White, the ex-HubSpot engineer behind what’s fast becoming one of my favorite follows on Twitter, “Web3 is going just great (and is definitely not an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet).”
This deserves some context. I first began covering high school football in Massachusetts as a high school student in 2003. I never got a chance to see Diamond Ferri, Cedric Washington or any of the Campbell or Morris brothers. So if you want to say this was the best performance of the 21st century instead, fine.