Generally speaking, murder is wrong.
But sometimes, it is necessary.
In writing, “murder your darlings” isn’t just an adage; it’s practically a commandment. It’s been attributed to Faulkner, who said “In writing, you must kill all your darlings,” but he probably got it from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who, in his 1916 book On the Art of Writing, said:
“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.”
And if you need someone more recent, and perhaps more published, to tell you this, here’s Stephen King from his book On Writing:
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
Not only can it be really hard to murder your darlings, it can be really hard to figure out what a darling is, let alone how to murder it! Do you stab a sentence? Poison a paragraph? Choke an entire chapter? Is this entire paragraph a darling to be murdered? Maybe! But I’m going to leave it, because I like it.
And that, my good people, is how you figure out what darlings need murdered!
How many times have you edited and rewritten and edited a short story or novel, or even a blog post, and eventually your eyes start to skip over certain lines or paragraphs? Every time you do, there may be a tiny voice in your head saying wait a minute! Does this really do anything? Could it be merged with that paragraph on page 74, or maybe even cut completely? And you immediately become affronted. Of course you’re not going to delete this! It’s fantastic! It’s funny/witty/evocative/sexy/suspenseful . . . you get the drift. In other words, it’s too something to cut.
This is something I’ve found myself wrestling with as I write this little romance novel I’m working on. (I’m even doing it now; I just deleted “more and more” after “wrestling.” Why? Because it wasn’t needed, that’s why!) I’ve known these characters for a long time now, but they have changed and seeing them change as I write has been fun and challenging. Some things, I admit, I’ve become enamored of. Certain lines, or jokes. Yes, descriptions. Certain plot lines, though most of those got the heave-ho before I ever really started writing.
And as I edit and revise, I find myself becoming more scrutinizing. Reading every line. Judging whether they’re necessary or not. When deciding whether to cut something or to keep it, I ask myself several questions.
1.) Does this paragraph or sentence (or chapter!) move the story forward?
2.) Does it give us information we need?
3.) Does it ask a question, or make the reader ask a question?
4.) Does it provide characterization, or enhance a character in some way?
5.) Does it increase the tension?
6.) Does it fit the story, or has the story evolved past it?
7.) Is it actually a darling? Or is it integral to the story?
8.) And maybe most important of all: Will the reader miss it?
In other words . . . am I hanging on to this bit of writing because it truly adds to the book – or because I like it?
One should never murder pretty prose just because some dead guy (and the author of like 10,000 best-selling novels) tells you to. One should never murder a character or plot point just because you like it, and that makes you think it doesn’t serve the story. It’s up to you to figure out if it fits the story or not. If your character likes to speak in long, rambling, descriptive paragraphs that bring to mind the writings of Alexander Hamilton, by all means leave them in, because that is how your character speaks. (A funny aside: while one of Washington’s aides-de-camp, Hamilton once had to write to a girl that no, Washington wouldn’t give her a pass to come through the lines to see someone. All he had to say was, “Sorry, but His Excellency will not allow it.” Instead, he spent two pages letting her down easy. Could I have murdered this darling? Sure, but wasn’t it fun to learn that?!)
Think about how many novels contain paragraphs of descriptions that set the mood and tone. Imagine The Lord of the Rings without descriptions of – well, everything. If your novel is set in a place that requires intricate descriptions, those are probably darlings you won’t murder, because they’re not really darlings. They’re an integral part of the story.
Just this week, I’ve murdered several darlings. One was just today, and it was from one of the few scenes that actually made it from the original book to this one. Dana has been invited to dinner at Alex’s family’s house, and there, sees a portrait of one of Alex’s ancestors. In the original (and up until this morning), she commented on how much Alex looks like him; Alex is taken aback, and says he’d never noticed it before. Originally, it was meant to comment on Alex’s self-consciousness and the family dynamics, but all of that had changed with this new book, and I kept cutting it down, until finally today I just looked at those few lines I had left, and thought: “Does this still serve a purpose? Will any reader ever miss that?”
The answer was no.
So it was cut.
Tonight, I cut an entire chapter. It conveyed information, but that was all it did. I moved some of the most important conversations to another scene entirely, where it could create a little more context and tension, and what was left over wasn’t important enough to keep. Voila! Chapter gone!
Last night, I rewrote the ending to another chapter that lacked tension. Actually, that meant rewriting about three pages, but in the end, the chapter is much stronger, and those things I cut and changed? No one will ever know they were there but me.
And that’s the thing I keep returning to. The one benchmark I keep in the back of my mind. Will the reader miss it? And let’s be honest: the answer is almost always going to be no, isn’t it? Unless you have some beta readers who might have seen an earlier draft, no one but you will ever know what you cut. No one but you will ever miss your murdered darlings! Isn’t that freeing? Isn’t that empowering?!
None of this is to say that you can’t write darlings that you might murder later. You should never censor yourself in those first few drafts. That’s not what ‘murder your darlings’ means. But when you’ve finished those first drafts, and you’re starting rewrites, that’s when you start.
That’s what first (and second and third and eighteenth) drafts are for. That’s when we’re exploring our world, getting to know our characters, getting everything down on paper. Even Quiller-Couch said “whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it whole-heartedly.” Write it, get it out of your system. You might end up keeping it! You might end up using it in a different book. And even if you don’t, it’s never truly gone. It’ll always be there in old drafts (that is, as long as you save your old drafts!).
This is also why Stephen King advocates that once you finish that first (or second or, ahem, twentieth) draft, you put the novel away for a good long while – at least 6 weeks – before you choose a night to print it, sit down, and read it through. As you do, you’ll become aware that “It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours . . . and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else . . . This is the way it should be, the reason you waited.
“It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings than it is to kill your own.”
So go forth. Commit murder.* You have my blessing.
* on your manuscript. Anything else is wrong and illegal. Yeah. That’s it. Wrong and illegal.
KS Writer & Teacher 