Kill Your Darlings, But Do It With Love

"Kill your darlings" is advice you’ve almost definitely heard bandied about in writing circles. It makes a great soundbite. It’s short, to the point, and has a tone that feels final. 

Metaphors are supposed to clarify, but "Kill your darlings" often does the opposite. The phrase has spent a century convincing writers that revision requires cutting their best work, and that taking a hacksaw to their writing is necessary if they want to improve. But the violence of the phrase carries a finality and brutality that I personally think works against the fundamental meaning it carries. 

Writers who get good at editing understand that killing your darlings is fundamentally an act of love. It’s not about destruction, it’s about care. You don’t prune a plant because you want it to die. You prune it because you want it to become healthier and stronger, and that same rule applies to your writing. You don’t edit because your words aren’t worthy. You edit because it serves the story.

Where does the phrase come from?

The phrase we all know had a different beginning. Cambridge academic Arthur Quiller-Couch, told students in a 1913 to 1914 lecture series (later published as On the Art of Writing):

"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. Murder your darlings."

There's an older version of the same idea in George Meredith's 1859 novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, where a father forces his son to burn a manuscript of his own poetry, and the narrator describes it as "killing one's darling child."  

And while the wording is not identical, academic Rebecca Mitchell traces the idea back even further, to Samuel Johnson, who told his biographer James Boswell, in an exchange recorded in Boswell's Life of Johnson: 

"Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."

The version most people actually quote is often (erroneously) attributed to William Faulkner: "In writing, you must kill all your darlings," but in Forrest Wickman's 2013 investigation for Slate, he found no evidence that Faulkner ever said or wrote it. But in his 2000 memoir, On Writing, Stephen King cemented the version most writers use today: 

"Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings."

A bad word for a good thing

While I’m a sucker for a bit of etymology, knowing a phrase's history does not actually change the advice it’s describing, which is the through-line of every version of it. Killing your darlings sounds like it’s just brutally cutting words from your manuscript, but what it’s actually about is editorial judgement. It’s about being able to step back and understand that a line, no matter how good, needs to serve a reader’s experience of the book, and not the writer’s ego.

The word "kill" has popularised the phrase precisely because it's dramatic, and drama is memorable. But it's also masking the truth of how writers need to understand what the advice is trying to tell them. If cutting your own best writing sounds like violence, the natural response is to avoid it, or rush it to get an unpleasant task over with rather than do it well. Neither produces good editing. Good editing requires care. It’s not about being indiscriminate, but about being willing to do the hard thing if it means you’ll have a better book by the end of it.

Pruning isn't punishment

If we reframe the idea of killing your darlings, then perhaps a better word than “killing” would be “pruning.” Nobody accuses a gardener of cruelty for cutting back a plant that has grown past what its roots can support. You don’t cut a plant out of spite, or because the growth isn't beautiful. You do it for the plant, so the energy going into one overextended branch can go into maintaining the rest of it.

A manuscript works the same way. A “darling” is usually the line, scene, or character you've fallen for hardest, and is almost always very good writing. Cutting bad prose is easy, but the bit that’s hard is cutting something you love. And because you love the bit you have to cut, it’s easy to forget that the cut itself is an act of love. If an especially good piece of prose is drawing resources away from the rest of your manuscript, be it pacing, flow, or redundancies, then cutting it isn’t a judgement of its quality, but a judgement on its place in this particular manuscript. You’re sacrificing a single piece of your manuscript for love of the whole.

 You don't spend time pruning a plant you don't care about. You let it grow wild, or you let it die. Pruning is what you do to something you're invested in becoming the best version of itself, and that's precisely the relationship you need to have to your own manuscript in order to kill your darlings.

How to distinguish love from attachment

I’m going to be a bit loose with my framing here, but I think for the sake of looking at the whole, it’s an important distinction. For me, there’s a difference between the love you have for your project vs the attachment you feel to a very specific piece of writing. 

Attachment makes you push for a piece to stay, even if it breaks your story flow or creates a plot hole. It means you’ll make accommodations to make it fit, even if the story has to warp and stretch in unnatural ways to make it work. It’s a justification, rather than a genuine love for the work you’re creating.

Love, on the other hand, is about elevating your whole manuscript and doing what needs to be done to make it everything it can be. It’s entirely possible to love a line and still cut it. But if you let attachment drive your editing choices, you’ll betray your project’s potential. 

To kill your darlings in this way requires you to be honest with yourself about your work. You need to be able to approach your work with a reader’s eye, and determine whether including something is mostly for you, or if it actually improves the story you’re trying to tell. 

So what does this look like in practice?

Editing is hard. It’s hard work, and it’s not always fun. We grow attached to our writing. We spill our hearts and souls onto the page, so it can be really difficult to take a scalpel to those pages and decide what stays and what ends up on the cutting room floor. So how can we kill our darlings, while continuing to love them?

Don’t delete your words

Never delete anything permanently.

I don’t mean don’t cut it from the manuscript. Absolutely do do that. But don’t get rid of it entirely. 

Keep files and notes of removed lines and scenes. They may not work for this piece, but they might fit somewhere else later. Or, you might just want to refer back to them to read something beautiful you wrote.

Kill your darlings, but give them an afterlife.

Test the gaps

If you think you’ve found a darling, read what comes before and after it like the gap was never there.

If there's a hole the reader would trip over, you didn't find a darling, you found a support beam. Put it back, and instead of cutting, think about how you can improve what that particular piece of writing is actually doing.

If a small edit is all it takes to make that gap work, then your darling has to go. It may be good, but it’s not useful. Save it for another project where it can get the chance to shine.

Ask who you’re writing for

Some pieces are written for the reader. Some are written for you, so you can prove to yourself that you can write like that.

Both are fine reasons to write, but only one of them should earn a place in the finished manuscript. Be honest with yourself about which one you're looking at, and the cut usually makes itself. 

A lot of darlings are self-indulgent, and if they are, you have to be willing to let them go.

Hand someone else the reigns

Pretty much all of us will experience moment where we’re just too close to our own work. It’s all well and good to tell you to kill your darlings, but after while, it can be difficult to spot them. 

There is nothing wrong with stepping back and handing the task to someone else. You should always do a few rounds of edits yourself, but at some point, it’s ok to pass it over. 

Whether it’s an editor or a beta reader, they’ll approach your work without the closeness you have. They’ll see things it’s easy for you to miss. But you need to be able to take critique. If a reader or an editor things something doesn’t work, take that seriously. You might love that particular line, phrase, or subplot, but if it’s not landing with others, then it’s important that you’re open to making the necessary cuts.

Killing your darlings doesn’t have to be an act of violence; it can be an act of love. Prune what the book doesn't need. Keep what you cut. Do it with love, and the rest will grow into the best version of itself.