This being Valentine’s Day, maybe “On killing your sweethearts” would be a more appropriate title for this post. But since most writers are familiar with the phrase “kill your darlings,” let’s stick with that.
I was scrolling through Threads last night when I ran across a discussion about the phrase, thanks to a post by the novelist Michael Chabon.
In response, the threaderverse chimed in with opinions about the meaning of the phrase (kill your main characters? kill your story line? murder the plot before it gets too far along? etc.) and its origins (some commenters stuck to their beliefs that it originated with Chekhov or Shaw or Faulkner — such is the internet — but another commenter identified the source as Arthur Quiller-Couch [who?], who, I learned from this Slate article, “spread it in his widely reprinted 1913-1914 Cambridge lectures ‘On the Art of Writing‘,” although he explicitly advised writers to murder their darlings, not merely kill them).
Regardless of who gets the credit, this brutal advice lives on, more than a century later. William Faulker, Stephen King and many others have repeated this admonition.
Quiller-Couch said:
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—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
Arthur Quiller-Couch, “On the Art of Writing”
This piece from a website called The Write Practice puts it more practically.
Darlings, in writing, are those words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and even chapters that we are often most proud of. We love them, to the point that we almost don’t care if those bits are clear to readers or not. We love them, and we want to keep them.
The problem begins when they don’t serve the reader.
Ruthanne Reid, “Revision: How to ‘Kill Your Darlings’ and Survive the Process”
Yes. Serving the reader should be foremost in a writer’s mind, especially if you writing is intended to pay the bills. If you’re a marketing copywriter, a journalist, or a PR practitioner, you know that your darlings will not help get the job done.
This piece from MasterClass provides more practical tips. I won’t list them here, but they cover familiar ground. Get rid of redundancies, cliches, etc. Still, the tips are worth revisiting.
The assumption is that the darling destruction occurs during the editing and revising process. But is it possible that the darling you need to slay is an entire project? Maybe the novel you’ve been working on, or a short story or poem?
Maybe your darling epic has turned into a vicious giant, like Goliath. Or worse, like Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors. Now, the prospect of killing our darlings becomes even more daunting.
During my years in journalism, public relations, marketing, ghostwriting, and speechwriting, I learned to be a ruthless self-editor. When it comes to editing my own fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction, however, I have a more difficult time. Because the darlings in my charge are my own creation. They were not handed over like some ward of the state for temporary custody to do with as I wished for the greater good of brevity, clarity, commerce, or publicity, as was the case with many of the darlings I slayed in my career. They weren’t my darlings, anyway. I was paid and entrusted to be their executioner, the one who lined those cliches, hackneyed phrases, too-trite words, and bloated, verbose sentences against the wall, blindfolded them, lit their final cigarettes, and did my ready-aim-fire duty.
Today, as I pivot to writing my words for myself, I don’t lean as many of those darlings up against the wall as I should. I tend to keep many of them on a sort of neglected life support. These are the scribbled notes on pads of paper and comatose poems and stories languishing on the hard drive that I believe to be worth saving. I hope against hope that, given enough time, some of them will come out of it, like those miraculous stories that are the stuff of tabloid headlines. Coma Baby Lives!
AI-generated image via Copilot, powered by DALL-E.
Andy writes! 
I find the editing and revision process the hardest, most grueling. It generally just seems so daunting when I first start. Part of that is likely because of my aversion to killing my darlings.
I hear you. Sometimes in the editing and revising, I end up creating two or three new darlings for every one I exterminate.
Whoa, this sentence deserves to be canonized in the quote sanctum: “I was paid and entrusted to be their executioner, the one who lined those cliches, hackneyed phrases, too-trite words, and bloated, verbose sentences against the wall, blindfolded them, lit their final cigarettes, and did my ready-aim-fire duty.”