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You have surely heard this advice: “Kill Your Darlings”. It might mean well, as its motivation is to help you remove unnecessary text. But there’s a crucial detail: Why on earth would “darlings”, text associated with something you like, actually be unnecessary?

To be fair, I need to make a differentiation here. “Kill Your Darlings” means one thing in nonfiction and another in fiction. The dynamics are different, for reasons we’ll see in this post. But here is the sneak preview: Because “Darlings” is associated with something you like (we’ll see more details and definitions in a while), it refers to affect. And there is quite a bit of difference between nonfiction and fiction when it comes to affect, a way of feeling.

Though I will briefly speculate on what “Kill Your Darlings” may mean in nonfiction, most of the focus of the post will be on fiction. I’ll first start with some definitions – what “darlings” are, and what “Kill Your Darlings” really means. Then, we’ll take a brief look at why killing your darlings is awful advice when it comes to fiction. Finally, as I said, I’ll end the post with a brief speculation regarding what killing your darlings involves in nonfiction.

Kill Your Darlings: Meaning and Dynamics

The phrase “Kill Your Darlings” (or some variation of it) is usually attributed to William Faulkner. Its more likely original author is Arthur Quiller-Couch. In any case, that’s immaterial. What matters is the meaning: Whenever you’ve found a trope, motif, theme, expression, etc. you like a lot, you should… remove it.

Preposterously, this peculiar piece of advice emerged in the context of style and “the art of writing”. Here’s what Quiller-Couch advocated:

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.

“On the Art of Writing”. Original emphasis.

Was this guy serious?

Later in the post I will attempt to see how “Kill Your Darlings” might offer some useful insights, but let’s be clear about this: Art is about affect. Art is about the mediation of a set of experiences. Indeed, art is about the subconscious mediation of cultural (that is to say, collective) experiences.

Art is, to quote the incomparable Bill Hicks, “play from your fucking heart”.

What “Kill Your Darlings” Means for Your Novel

Let’s start from the practicalities. I’ll take an excerpt from The Perfect Gray that I really like – one of my darlings. I’ll explain why I like it. Then I’ll attempt to rewrite it removing all the elements I liked, substituting them with others. This should be fun…

We hold each other there, in the immortal temporal stream, yin and yang, our energies intertwined, two celestial bodies in tidal locking, as he’s staring at my tattoo, spellbound, and as I feel my magic powers are capable of the impossible – freezing the Stygian waters.

The reason I like this excerpt is obviously connected to its wider context (feel free to email me for a free, no-strings-attached digital copy or download directly from this page).

But even only looking at this on its own, it has a sense of rhythm. Indeed, as you read it you probably don’t even realize it’s all one sentence. It simply flows – “in the immortal temporal stream”. Rhythm is something I pay attention to when I write.

I mean, what better example about how far I’m willing to go about rhythm than the following excerpt from the first chapter of The Perfect Gray:

Boy wants toy, owned by another boy. Give me your toy, you silly old boy, or else I’ll uncover your dastardly ploy. But it is my toy, it brings me such joy! Yeah, that is the problem, you stupid cowboy – your blonde little toy that you so much enjoy, has caused you the business to almost destroy. Oh well, whatever, it’s started to cloy.

I was the toy.

Rhythm is one of my authorial trademarks; my voice.

I also like the expression “freezing the Stygian waters”, as it’s connected both to the protagonist, Hecate, and to the wider themes and concepts in the novel. Similarly, the expression “two celestial bodies in tidal locking” is a uniquely beautiful metaphor for two people in a relationship that is intense but remains chaste and restrained.

So, shall we see how to… ruin this?

Why Killing Your Darlings Kills Affect

This is awful. But I said I’d try. So here goes:

We hold each other there, in the suspended moment. Our eyes remain fixed on each other, yet our bodies don’t come any closer – two trees in the same orchard, forever apart. He’s staring at my tattoo, enthralled, while I feel hopeful enough to wish the impossible – capturing time and keeping it from marching toward the inevitable.

This is truly awful. It lacks a soul, it lacks a heart. The worst thing is, it’s not even mine. I can’t recognize it as something I’d normally write.

Can Killing Your Darlings Be Useful?

This is a tricky point.

First of all, let’s agree on something: It goes without saying that editing your work is a pretty fundamental part of the process. But recall what I’ve said in my “Write Drunk, Edit Sober” post:

Content editing is not about making it correct, but about making it right.

Perhaps “write drunk, choose what to edit sober, edit drunk” might be an even better fiction editing tip!

In other words, it might be so that during the editing process – when you’re sober, that is, you approach the text from a more detached perspective – you’ve realized a certain part (containing your darlings) isn’t optimal.

Still, you shouldn’t kill your darlings. Perhaps you only need to substitute one darling for another, or maybe dress a darling different. But affect is still needed.

What About Nonfiction?

In theory, nonfiction doesn’t contain as much affect and should be (somewhat) more objective.

However, there is some wiggle room here, too. If we imagined a continuum the two ends of which are, say, a doctoral dissertation and a casual blog post (like the one you’re reading right now), things aren’t going to have a simple answer.

Moreover, the term “darlings” in nonfiction is trickier to define, especially if we move closer to the formal end of the continuum. I mean, though the use of metaphoric language certainly isn’t unheard of in that context, it’s not of the same magnitude as in fiction. To put it this way, I can’t see how I would’ve inserted a whole paragraph of partially rhymed and metered text into my doctoral dissertation.

Still, that doesn’t mean nonfiction is completely clinical, devoid of all affective impact. It shouldn’t be.

Ultimately, the best piece of advice I can come up with when it comes to killing your darlings in nonfiction is this: Remain focused on your argument and topic in general. It’s easy to go off on a tangent, because language, like literature, is a connection game. Realize you can’t talk about everything in a given paper, and prioritize the precision of your argument over the beauty or appeal of something parenthetical.

Kill Your Darlings: Art or Marketing?

Thanks to an insightful comment by acflory (see comment section below), I decided to add an afterthought to this post. Ironically, it’s something I often do in such posts, but I neglected it here. This not unimportant disclaimer is the following:

I approach writing from the perspective of art, not marketing.

In other words, to the ever-confusing question, Are you an artist or a writer?, I lean much more fervently toward art. True art, where you simply don’t care about sales or promotion (at least not in the we’ve-always-done-it-this-way manner).

However, this isn’t a right-or-wrong matter, not in the slightest. It’s only about getting the most out of what you want to do. You, the author, are the final authority on your work. As I’ve repeatedly suggested, avoid cargo cult writing (that is, mindlessly doing what others do) and, as crucially, learn how to approach writing advise critically.

Some Darlings Can’t Survive in Capitalism

With this in mind, the matter of killing your darlings as described in this post depends – as everything else in literature – on where exactly you stand on the writing-as-art vs writing-as-sales continuum. Considering sales, genre, and whatnot is effectively a filtering process; a destructive one, in a sense. You literally self-censor yourself in order to please an audience.

If your authorial priorities include selling books, killing your darlings is probably an inevitable process. Some darlings must be killed in order for the book to survive in the market. The extent of the… cull likely depends on many complex factors, such as genre, scope, and individual elements.

If you ask me, it’s much simpler to just write what you want in the first place, and then attract the right kind of audience, no matter how small. But, again, this is only a personal opinion; not universal wisdom. There is no right and wrong in literature; only priorities.