Killing Your Darlings, Gently

Kill your darlings is one of the most quoted pieces of writing advice in existence, attributed variously to William Faulkner, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Johnson, and Arthur Quiller-Couch, which is itself evidence that the advice is old and widely recognized as important. The instruction is clear in its general direction: the things you love most in your own writing are the things most likely to need cutting.

The advice is correct and it's also frequently misapplied in ways that produce worse writing rather than better.

The misapplication tends to go like this: a writer hears kill your darlings, decides that affection for their own work is inherently suspect, and begins cutting anything that feels especially good to them. The result is a draft that has been systematically stripped of some of its most alive elements. The voice flattens. The specificity diminishes. The passages that had genuine energy have been removed in the name of discipline, and what remains is competent and dull.

This is not what the advice means. Understanding what it actually means produces revision that keeps the things worth keeping and removes the things that were always serving the writer rather than the piece.

What a Darling Actually Is

A darling, in the revision sense, is not simply a passage or a sentence you love. It's a passage or a sentence you love that isn't earning its place in the piece.

The distinction is important. Not all beloved passages are darlings in the problematic sense. Some of the things you love most in a piece are the things that are most alive and most essential. The sentence that came as a gift, that said something you didn't know you were going to say and that's more true than anything you tried to say deliberately. The image that crystallized something the whole piece was circling. The moment where the voice became most fully itself. These passages are loved because they're working, and they should stay.

The darling that needs killing is different. It's the passage you love that you love for reasons that are about you rather than about the piece. You love it because it took a long time to write. You love it because it demonstrates a skill or displays a knowledge you're proud of. You love it because the image is beautiful even though it doesn't quite belong in this piece. You love it because of the experience that generated it rather than because of what it does for the reader. You love it for what it cost you rather than for what it gives.

These are the darlings that the advice is targeting. Not the things that are alive in the piece. The things that are in the piece because you couldn't bear to cut them, even though a less attached reader would find them disproportionate, or out of tone, or irrelevant, or simply excessive.

How to Identify the Ones That Need to Go

The darling that needs cutting tends to have a specific quality that's recognizable when you know what you're looking for.

It's usually more than the piece needs it to be. More beautiful than the surrounding material, which makes it stand out in the wrong way. More detailed than the narrative or the argument requires, which slows the piece at the moment when it should be moving. More emotionally weighted than the scene or the section can support, which tips the piece off balance. The darling that needs cutting tends to be the place where you can feel the writer's presence in the text as an intrusion rather than as a voice, where the writer is showing something rather than the piece being something.

It's usually loved disproportionately to what it contributes. When you ask yourself what this passage does for the piece that nothing else could do, the answer is either nothing or something that something less beloved could do more cleanly. The darling that's worth keeping earns its love by doing something essential. The darling that needs cutting is loved independently of what it contributes, which is the signal.

And it's usually resistant to revision in a specific way. The passage that's a genuine darling in the problematic sense tends to resist being made smaller or more efficient, because making it smaller would reduce the display of the thing you love about it. The beautiful image that's disproportionately long could be shorter, but shortening it would remove what makes it feel like yours. The extended anecdote that's amusing but tangential could be summarized, but summarizing it would lose the voice that plays out in the telling. The resistance to efficient revision is often the sign of a darling that's in the piece for you rather than for the piece.

The Saving File

One of the most practical techniques for killing darlings without the grief that cutting beloved material tends to produce is the saving file.

Before you cut a darling, cut it into a separate document rather than deleting it. The saving file contains everything you've cut from the piece: the sections, the sentences, the images, the passages. Nothing is lost. Everything that was cut is somewhere accessible, could be retrieved if it turned out the cut was wrong.

This technique works because most of the grief in cutting darlings is the feeling of permanent loss, the sense that the thing you love is being destroyed. The saving file removes the permanence. You're not destroying the darling. You're moving it. It exists, in the saving file, where it can be read and mourned and occasionally revisited. The piece doesn't need it, but it's not gone.

In practice, most writers very rarely revisit the saving file. The passages that seemed indispensable during the cutting process turn out, on returning to them months or years later, to be clearly right to have cut. But knowing they're there makes the cutting possible in a way that permanent deletion sometimes isn't, and the cut is almost always the right decision even when it doesn't feel like it at the time.

Cutting With Precision

The advice to kill your darlings is often interpreted as cut the whole passage, remove the whole section, take out the entire anecdote. Sometimes this is what's needed. More often the darling can be cut with more precision than wholesale removal.

The beautiful image that's too long might be reducible to a single sentence that keeps its essential quality while losing the display of craft that was making it disproportionate. The extended anecdote that's tangential might be reducible to a brief reference that keeps the connection it was establishing without the full weight of the telling. The section that demonstrates a knowledge you're proud of might be reducible to the two or three sentences from it that actually serve the piece's argument.

Cutting with precision rather than wholesale tends to preserve what was genuinely valuable in the darling while removing what was excessive. The darling that was disproportionately long can become appropriately weighted. The darling that was showing off can become just good.

This precision cutting requires a more careful reading of the darling than wholesale removal does, because you have to identify what specifically is doing useful work and what specifically is the excess. But it tends to produce better outcomes than the blunter approach, because it keeps the live elements while removing the display.

The Darling as Diagnosis

Here's something that experienced revision teaches about darlings that isn't often discussed: the darling that needs cutting frequently reveals something important about what the piece needs.

The beautiful image that doesn't belong is often telling you where the piece's true center of gravity is, because the image was generated by a fascination that the piece as structured isn't fully serving. The extended anecdote that's tangential is often telling you about a subject that's adjacent to the piece's stated subject and that may be what the piece is actually about. The section that demonstrates a knowledge the piece doesn't need is often pointing at material that would be better served by a different piece.

Before cutting a darling, ask what it's telling you. Not whether to keep it, but what it reveals about where the piece's genuine energy is. Sometimes the darling that seems to need cutting is actually the clue to what the piece is really about, and the right response is not to cut it but to rebuild the piece around it.

This is the more surprising and more interesting possibility that the advice to kill your darlings doesn't usually mention. Sometimes the darling isn't wrong for the piece. The piece is wrong for the darling. The darling is more alive than the surrounding material because it's found the real subject and the surrounding material is organized around the wrong one.

Reading the darlings not just for whether they belong but for what they might be pointing at produces a richer kind of revision than simply cutting what seems disproportionate.

When the Darling Is the Voice

There's a specific kind of darling that needs special care: the passage that's disproportionate because the voice in it is more fully itself than the voice in the surrounding material.

This is the hardest darling to work with because cutting it doesn't solve the problem. If the darling has the voice the piece needs and the surrounding material doesn't, cutting the darling produces a piece that's more consistent but less alive, that has solved the problem of the disproportionate passage by eliminating the thing that was most worth having.

The right response to this kind of darling is usually not to cut it but to revise toward it. To bring the surrounding material up to the level of aliveness that the darling has rather than bringing the darling down to the level of the surrounding material. This is harder than cutting, and it requires an honest assessment of what makes the darling feel most fully like the voice and what's preventing the surrounding material from achieving the same quality.

The darling as the highest point in the piece is not a passage to kill. It's a passage to understand and to use as the standard for revision.

What to Keep

The revision that applies kill your darlings correctly keeps the things that are alive in the piece and removes the things that are in the piece for reasons that are about the writer's relationship to them rather than about what they do for the reader.

The beloved passage that's earning its place by doing something essential that the piece needs. The sentence that came as a gift and that's more alive than anything you tried to say deliberately. The image that crystallized something the whole piece was circling. The moment where the voice became most fully itself. These are not darlings in the problematic sense. These are the pieces finding their best moments, and they should be protected through revision rather than sacrificed to a misapplied principle.

Kill the darlings that are in the piece because you couldn't bear to cut them. Keep the passages that are in the piece because they're the piece at its best. The distinction is the work of revision, and making it honestly, every time, is what the advice was always actually pointing at.