Murder your darlings: the phrase no writer wants to hear, but the advice all of us should take

Picture this: you have finally finished your novel and edited it and are now ready to hand it over to someone to review. A few weeks later they come back with several plot points that they think don’t quite fit the rest of the story, and “would you be willing to remove this part?”. Your immediately spring to your story’s defense. “But that’s one of the first things I wrote for this story,” you may say. Or “It’s so witty, it just has to stay”. Any reviewer worth their salt will then gently advise you that it’s time to murder your darlings.

What does murdering your darlings mean?

To put is simply, murdering your darlings is the process of removing parts of the plot that you, as an author, are very attached to in order to make your story stronger. It is a necessary, if unfortunate, part of being an author, since you have to be able to look at your writing with an objective eye or be open to criticism, both of which take practice and a strong disposition.

Furthermore, it is often a matter of distance. When you are immersed and invested in a particular story it may be difficult to disconnect from that process long enough to distinguish something things that don’t quite fit in. As they say, “it’s hard to see the forest from the trees”. Worse still, the things that often need pruning are the ones that authors are most proud of, such as a witty turn of phrase, or an interesting side character that is only present for one scene. This emotional attachment is what makes this process particularly difficult.

But where did the idea of murdering your darlings originate from?

The idea of murdering your darlings as an author does not have clear origins. Some people attribute the concept to authors like Oscar Wilde or William Faulkner, but most scholars agree that it was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, a British author, who first mentioned it. In his 1916 book On the Art of Writing, Sir Quiller-Couch wrote: “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.’”

Many famous authors have since reiterated the idea, including Stephen King who famously said: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

How to murder your darlings in your writing

Use the following three tips to learn how to murder the darlings of your story, and become a better writer, no matter what you are your, from flash fiction to a novel, poetry, screenplays, and everything in-between.

• Get some distance

Before attempting to identify what needs to be cut, allow your manuscript a moment to rest. Any editing needs to be done from an objective point of view and this is almost impossible to accomplish while in the midst of actively writing it. Getting a second opinion from someone not involved in the story is also a good idea. Whether this is a paid editor, or a peer-review, make sure you ask them to look for points in your story that fall into this category. Just don’t ask your relatives or friends.

• Look for redundant and extraneous plot points and characters

When editing your story, make of point of keeping track of your subplots. How many can be eliminated or combined? Would it hurt the main plot if they were? Subplots should, at least tangentially, affect the main plot of a book or serve a narrative purpose. The same is true of secondary characters. Often an existing character can serve to deliver the information that is needed to further the plot in order to avoid introducing unnecessary side characters. Or two (or more) side characters can be combined into one, more fleshed out character.

• Don’t delete, recycle

That really interesting side character to whom you are irrationally attached and don’t want to get rid of? Do they maybe have their own story to tell? Perhaps not, but they may serve better as a secondary character in another story. Why not use them as a jumping point to create your next story? Murdering your darlings doesn’t mean that you have to get rid of the character or plot point altogether. It just means that they don’t fit in to that particular story. Recycling them into another plot, may assuage that feeling of loss that removing them from a story may have.

So when you are editing your story and it comes time to murder your darlings, rest assured that you are not alone. We all mourn those characters and paragraphs that we spent time gleefully creating only to find out that they had to be removed from the story. Let yourself grieve for them, but take courage from the fact that it will make your writing stronger and you, in turn, a better writer.

Disclaimer: No darlings were hurt in the making of this article. All above advice applies to murdering in the written word only. We are not responsible for murderous killing of darlings outside of one’s novel.