“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
– Stephen King
Of all the skills required to be a great writer, one of the most difficult is restraint. We get into the game for many reasons, but love for writing is always one of them. We’re captured by great characters, great stories, and great prose. What fun is writing if we can’t create our own masterpieces?
The topic for this article is “kill your darlings,” that heartbreaking piece of advice that any good editor will give you. In this article, I will dig into why it’s important to delete some of those paragraphs where you’ve cut loose and written “perfect” prose, and I will offer you a Story Weapon that will help you to distill your work to its essence.
“Killing your darlings” means removing parts of your writing that are beautifully crafted but ultimately don’t serve the story. This disciplined editing transforms a sprawling first draft into a tighter, more impactful story while keeping the story itself as the priority over your ego.
The story takes precedence
When you write something that we’d call a “darling,” it’s usually a piece of writing that is performatively good, but ultimately unnecessary. And it often sticks out to the reader. It’s like a second chair cellist unexpectedly taking center stage in an orchestra. We didn’t come to see the talent of one person (or one page, or scene), but the sound of a symphony.
Killing your darlings teaches you how to discriminate between:
- aspects of your writing that support the whole
- those moments that only sound good
This shows up often in schools of music and composition as well. A new music student, finally given an assignment to create a piece of their own, fills it with violins and crescendos. The piece is big and beautiful, and only that. After a few rounds of this and hearing the work of their classmates, the student learns that the production of beauty is more commonplace than they thought. Anyone can write a piece of music that sounds pretty; music itself is pleasant.
The same is true for language. It’s a great joy when we first write something lovely. The next step is to understand that creating something nice is one of the easier aspects of writing, and you still have room to grow.
You move on to another level when you start to understand that there’s a voice to be developed and that voice is yours. Not everything you say, surprisingly, is in your voice. It’s a mixture between what you want to say, what the story wants to say, and what the reader wants to hear. Somewhere in that mix, your ego is left behind and your personal style remains.
In writing a story, you are a second priority. The story is your first priority. It needs your voice, your attention, and your time. For the story, the darling is sometimes you.
“I just chipped away everything that wasn’t David.”
– Michelangelo
Great storytelling demands specificity
Another reason you must kill your darlings is the art of economy. Editing and rewriting means cutting out the fluff. Once you’re ready to part ways with those sections you thought you nailed, you often discover hidden truths you had not previously imagined. Ten pages becomes two pages, and suddenly the narrative has come alive in ways you hadn’t previously imagined. This practice, over time, helps you go from being a good writer to a more truthful one.
Trust that you haven’t written your last good sentence and that it was no accident to have created the darling in the first place. You’ll write more great sentences, especially when you write in service of the story and not yourself. This is how your writing can raise you above the conditions of your own life, your own feelings. It’s part of the magic that makes a pen move on its own, even while it stays in your hand.
Here’s some advice from Ray Bradbury in his book, Zen in the Art of Writing:
All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration. The artist learns what to leave out. The surgeon knows how to go directly to the source of trouble, how to avoid wasted time and complications. The athlete learns how to conserve power and apply it now here, now there, how to utilize this muscle, rather than that. Is the writer different? I think not. His greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go.
Although writing begins from the heart, perfecting your craft is the work of the mind. The rewrite is a process of constantly toggling between the left and right brain.
Learning to be economical and exacting in your work will, over time, lead to deeper storytelling. This is the beauty of precision. The books you love, even if they’re sprawling in scope and contain seven protagonists, were even bigger in their first drafts.
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”
– Ernest Hemingway
It’s always painful, but after a while you start to appreciate that the process makes even your first drafts more focused. In my 90-Day Novel and 90-Day Memoir workshops, for example, I teach a process of marrying the wildness of your imagination to the rigor of story structure as a means of avoiding an 800+ page manuscript devoid of narrative drive.
It’s like you’re trying to tap into the sound and heart of your piece and only fifteen percent of your first draft has the right tempo. Don’t get attached to the wrong notes; let them go and trust that you’re getting closer to your story’s melody.
Your story weapon: How to kill your darlings
There’s a right time to do it and a wrong one. When you’re writing your first draft, don’t worry yet about removing sections. The first draft is all about staying in your right brain, your wild mind, and simply getting the story down.
As E.L. Doctorow puts it, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” This is especially true of your first draft. Don’t worry about how fast you get there or how smooth your turns are. It’s enough that you stay on the road. Momentum and courage are your best friends.
The second draft is where your darlings go to die.
With the first draft complete, you’ve now mapped the route from the beginning to the end. And now it is time to explore a better route. Killing your darlings in the second draft is just taking out the detours (even if it passes some great scenery) and the wrong turns.
Your second draft should be much leaner than the first, and possibly even the third. But this is easier said than done, because the second draft often involves expanding and contracting simultaneously. You are editing, while at the same time, generating new material. The second draft is your time to identify the essential parts of the story. Anything that can go, should. The more you remove, the more you are able to identify what remains to be written.
Whether it’s taking advice from someone editing your book or making edits yourself, killing your darlings is a principle that’ll do much of the heavy lifting if you let it. It can be hard to see your thousand-page draft go down to three hundred pages. Try not to let it feel like your work is going to waste. Cutting out what needs to go is work itself, though it might be more of an emotional labor than a physical one.
Once you’re ready to let go of your darlings, you’ll find there’s plenty of story left to tell. And now, there’s room in your draft to tell it.
Are you looking for guidance and support in rewriting your novel or memoir? Come join my Rewrite Master Class. You can find more details here.
