Editing is hell.

It may look peaceful from the outside. A writer sitting at their desk with a red pen, manuscript spread out, marking and noting along the margins. Maybe there’s a cup of tea steaming next to them or some gentle snowfall at the windowsill. Cleaning up your work sounds satisfying, but if you have writer friends (or are one), you know that inside, the writer is in agony. Their first draft, still fresh from the womb, sits in front of them cooing while they hold the red pen like a knife. Writing is a vulnerable act. Picking something apart you poured your soul into hurts. Yet we do it again and again, hoping to build a tolerance to it. 

No amount of tolerance makes it easy, though. I’ve never met a writer who picked up their red pen and proclaimed, “Golly gee, I can’t wait to cut this work I’ve spent seven months of my life on to pieces!” It takes a level of detachment to look at your work and acknowledge what’s wrong with it, a detachment that is hard to come by. That’s why writers still pass down an old “Writing Rule” to make it easier to handle: Kill Your Darlings. 

“Kill Your Darlings” has been misattributed and misinterpreted in the years since it was first found in print. Authors from Oscar Wilde to Stephen King are credited with coining the phrase when, in reality, it was someone with a much less famous name: Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. The original quote comes from a lecture he gave at Cambridge in 1914 on writing style:

“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.” 

Quiller-Couch’s intended murder victim was “ornamental writing”, otherwise known today as “purple prose”. Over time, the quote has been reshaped into something broader, to help a myriad of writing issues. When someone today tells you to “Kill Your Darlings”, they can mean anything from purple prose to entire characters, from unnecessary dialogue to whole scenes or subplots. The current idea behind “Kill Your Darlings” is to view your work objectively and cut anything that disrupts the flow, regardless of how much you love it.

As an example: 

You’re writing a book about a charming vampire hunter who goes to the same bar every night. The plot revolves around the hunter meeting a vampire at the bar and falling in love with them. The regular hunting gig starts to feel less satisfying and more morally dubious as their romance deepens. The climax and conclusion center around a contract the hunter receives to kill their vampire love.

Throughout, the bar is populated by colorful side characters. There’s the hunter’s best friend, the all-knowing bartender, and a plucky werewolf down on their luck. One bar patron you’ve written, Denise, you love. You’ve written out her backstory (an ex-carnie turned fashion designer who makes clown-inspired jumpsuits), you know her personality (rowdy and always talking about hilarious one-night stands in Paris), and her motive (the dingy, small-town bar where no one knows her is the only place she can be herself). You’ve spent hours crafting her hilarious interjections and thinking about how she plays into the bar's atmosphere. You even have a mood board for her clown-inspired jumpsuits. 

But when editing time comes, you realize she only has one line of important, plot-relevant dialogue. All her banter, all her sexcapades, distract from the mood of the novel instead of enhancing it. It’s a difficult decision to kill what you love, but Denise has to go for the sake of tone and cohesion. You delete all traces of Denise and give her important line to the bartender instead. The book reads smoother now, with fewer clown-shaped bumps. You Killed Your Darling Denise, and the book is better off.

“Kill Your Darlings” is a very good technique to learn, especially for those starting their writing adventure. It helps the writer uncouple themselves from the words they wrote or the emotions they feel about it to look at the piece with a critical eye. It doesn’t always work, mind you- everyone has an inherent bias towards their own writing- but it can separate a lot of the wheat from the chaff. This is one “Writing Rule” that I can stand behind.

Where it goes wrong is in the communication of this advice. If someone tells a writer, “Kill Your Darlings” and never explains further than, “Kill anything you love,” it can kneecap anything the writer makes. Some may take it too literally, cutting anything they like because they think it’s “too self-indulgent”. Some consider the whole work their love and, unable to cut, go to an editor, taking any criticism as a reason to cut entire sections instead of reworking them. The worst offender, the one that truly destroys all their creative enjoyment, is the writer who self-edits. Knowing they’ll be killing their darlings later, the writer halts ideas before they’ve begun. All of their story elements are carefully regulated to what the end product is supposed to be in their head. They keep characters from living on the page, or the plot from going in any direction other than the one pre-ordained by their original idea. All these methods kill creativity in the name of making editing the final work easier. Many writers taking this advice never get past their first draft. In their urge to see the forest, they cut too many trees. 

The miscommunication of “Kill Your Darlings” stems from how the first, integral part of Quiller-Couch’s quote is often left out:

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—”

Without your darlings taking the reins once in a while, great books would never be written. Writing needs a dash of unpredictability, especially for the writer, to fuel the creative furnaces. Besides, your darlings are darlings for a reason: you love them. There’s something about them that makes you happy. Why would you delete them? Why don’t we take the time to investigate them or contemplate where they came from? No wonder editing is hell if all we’re doing is taking half-formed ideas we adore and throwing them in the fire.

Since “Kill Your Darlings” is so often misinterpreted, I suggest changing the name to something like “Rehome Your Darlings”. This will stop new writers who are trigger-happy, while also relieving the pain of those who already follow the original advice with good results. Your darlings, the strange ideas or words you grow attached to, don’t have to be deleted forever. Cut and paste them into a new document, a blank named “Orphanage for Darlings”. Come back to them when the editing is over. Consider why you loved it so much, why they didn’t fit into the story. 

Going back to our example:

Instead of deleting Denise, you put all her scenes and dialogue into a separate document. After the edit is done, you reread the Denise document, wondering what about her made you love her so much. You realize that her dialogue was some of the best you’d ever written. You dust off the clown-inspired jumpsuit mood board and the outrageous sexcapade monologues. 

The vampire hunter romance submitted to a publisher, you take your newfound free time and start writing more scenes where Denise is now the star. A plot emerges. A new idea forms. Suddenly you’re rushing for a pen and paper to scribble an outline of Denise’s great love story, which involves hurling on a Tilt-A-Whirl, a dead jellyfish on a beach, and Paris Fashion Week. 

The vampire hunter romance gets rejected, but that’s okay- you have something new for your agent. A new manuscript starring your favorite darling, Denise. And if this one gets rejected, well, during the edit you’d found another glimmering piece that didn’t quite fit and rehomed it. Maybe that has potential, too.

Writing something that doesn’t click with the rest of your work may be indicative of what you want to write. It might be that the novel you’re writing takes a turn into the zany, not because you’re a bad writer, but because you didn’t like the direction it was taking. Or you could write a character that interests you far more than your main character, showing you that your protagonist isn’t fleshed out enough. If you deleted these sections or, heavens help us, self-edited before allowing them to make the page, you’d be doing your work a disservice. 

Try “Rehoming Your Darlings” the next time you edit. Don’t allow the backspace button anywhere near your draft. Put the red pen away and grab a highlighter instead. It will make it easier to edit, knowing you’re not trashing what you love, while still allowing for a proper amount of detachment needed to edit. Editing doesn’t have to be hell. You don’t have to take your darlings out behind the barn and put them down. Your darlings can help. They’re there to inform you, not harm you. Listen to what they have to say.