Wednesday Writing: Kill Your Darlings

So last Saturday I went to a fortnightly coffeeshop critique session with the university creative writing society. It’s always a great time, ideas flying around, caffeine being inhaled, cakes everywhere, and after a while discussion turned to the idea of killing your darlings [or, as someone rather alarmingly put it ‘smothering your babies’]. If you haven’t heard the term before, it means editing or cutting a piece of your writing that you love, in order to improve the overall piece. It can include wonderful lines of description, certain scenes you love which don’t match with the pacing or people think are irrelevant, or sometimes even whole characters. It’s a thing writers loathe to do, and possibly one of the hardest decisions you’ll encounter as an author.

But it is necessary.

Often, it’s because, as much as you love it, it doesn’t add to the story. Or worse, it pulls down the pace or the atmosphere, clashing with the reader’s sense of your story. Stephen King once wrote in his amazing non-fic book On Writing [which you should check out now] that writing was a little like excavating a fossil; you dig very carefully, and you smooth away sand and dirt gradually, and at the end you’re left with a tiny fossil or a huge dinosaur skeleton, but either way you’re left with a story. And that’s what people need to take away from the experience of killing darlings. Darlings are the sand and grit clinging to your beautiful excavated fossil. Yeah sure, it works without cleaning them, but hey if you’re proud of it and you want to display it and point and go ‘I did this’ wouldn’t it help to clean it up a bit? Especially if you can’t see the bone for the grime.

Sometimes killing your darlings is easy. Sometimes you hear the criticism and it clicks and you realize you can live without that extra line of description or dialogue, or that you didn’t really like that character much after all. And sometimes, it seems practically impossible. When that happens to me, I like to open up a new word document, and either copy and paste chunks of text across, or type up what I want to keep again onto the new document, with the old version open beside me. And at the end, it means I can have both versions: the one I secretly prefer, with all my amazing lines nobody wants to read, and the edited and polished version everyone else prefers. That way, it feels less like killing my darlings and more like storing them in a jar for a rainy day.