It’s not a darling.īut if your text suddenly seems clearer, if it flows better, and the story arc or the course of the argument is better, then you must kill it. Does the text get dull without it? Is there a logical step missing? Then put it back in. This is the litmus test: Take out that darling and copy it to a separate page. Let’s find out if it’s a darling you need to kill. Do you resent doing that? Great – you’ve found a possible darling! Those are the bits you’re extremely proud of. Identifying your darlings is relatively easy. Killing your darlings is a powerful tool. Use those tools with purpose so you can achieve the result you want. We need to be able to use the tools of our craft. It’s this detachment that lets us choose what and how we write. But there comes a time when writers need to accomplish a certain detachment. What It Really MeansĪs creative people, writers need to immerse themselves in their texts. Please keep writing those darlings! You just need to know how to deal with them in the end. He’s a clever man he knows that repressing impulses wouldn’t work anyway. Read Quiller-Couch again: he does say you should obey that impulse. After all, writing is your favourite activity, right? So, to prevent darlings, are writers supposed to turn into cold-hearted scribblers? No! You’re still welcome to pour your emotions onto your page. Quiller-Couch talked about murdering darlings after completing the text, but these darlings can appear at other times, too (please read on). It stops us from creating a successful story arc, a plot, or an argument. This attachment stops us from having that professional distance. But darlings prevent us from doing just that. No big deal – if we can get back to business. So why do we put them there in the first place? The Great Danger Of Darlingsĭarlings come up again and again because of our attachment to the text and because of our love of language. But be honest: most of the time, they don’t contribute to the story. We like them because they sparkle with our smartness, and we’ve worked so hard to come up with them. The headline we worked on for hours and we think is worthy of a Pulitzer (I hope you catch the sarcasm here).Īll these things are showy. The killer paragraph that shows how intelligent we are. That one sentence we all think is so exceptionally good. The darlings that writers are supposed to murder are those pieces of text that we’re so in love with. However, historically, the other phrasing has been more popular, so in this blog post, we’ll continue to ‘kill’ our darlings. That control makes all the difference, and that’s why the word ‘murder’ is the better word choice. Let’s remember that he was writing about style, and how a writer should be able to control it, rather than let style control the writer. Let me explain why Quiller-Couch is more accurate. ‘Killing’ simply means that you take away a life. That’s important! ‘Murder’ requires thinking, purpose, and control. If you’re a stickler for accuracy, you’ll note that Quiller-Couch talks about murder, not killing. ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. It all goes back to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s book On The Art Of Writing (1916), where he says: ‘Kill your darlings’ – many attribute this phrase to William Faulkner or even Stephen King. This blog post will answer all those questions. When I heard it for the first time, I had loads of questions: Why does a writer have to kill anything? And what’s that darling everybody talks about? How are you supposed to kill it? And where does that phrase come from? Because it works and there’s so much truth in it. Kill Your Darlings!Īll creative writing teachers love that phrase. Do you know what it means? And what it doesn’t mean? This article will show you when killing your darlings is good. ‘Kill your darlings’ is a phrase that all creative writing teachers love to use.
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