February 13, 2023
“Kill Your Darlings” May Mean Well: It Is Still Awful Advice
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.
4 Comments
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Hmm…I’m seriously conflicted about this. Writing fiction is one thing, publishing that fiction is another. When I write, I write /for myself/ first and foremost. Only after the story is out of my head do I start to think about publishing, and that means rewriting /my/ story for others. To do that, I have to see the story as some unknown reader might see it, someone without my background, or world view, or depth of reading. In short, someone who isn’t me.
This is where ‘kill your darlings’ comes in. Is that luscious paragraph going to give the Reader a deeper insight into The Story? Or is it simply a piece of self-indulgence on my part?
In Vokhtah, I force Readers to jump in at the deep end and learn about an alien world and culture from within. I force them to essentially get used to a different way of speaking, thinking and seeing…and most Readers give up before they get far enough into the story to want to continue.
I know that. I knew it before I published the story, but those elements were integral to The Story so they had to stay. In every other way, however, I tried to make the reading of The Story as pleasurable or at least, as painless as possible.
Vokhtah will never become a cult classic…hah…but it’s the most ‘user friendly’ I could make it without compromising the core story. It’s a balancing act, and I guess that’s what I’m trying to say: unless we write solely for ourselves, we have to put The Story first, and that means balancing our darlings against the needs of the Reader.
I’d argue these are two different and indeed conflicting processes. One is writing-as-art, the other writing-as-marketing. One is allowing pure affect to pour out, the other is diluting it (and if I wanted to be harsher I could here pick a world like “mutilating”) in order to please an audience.
Still, you’re right. I write exclusively from the perspective of art, so I sometimes forget to include a reference to marketing in order for the analysis to be complete. I’ll very likely come back to this post with an addendum. Thanks!
What is written and what is read are not the same. But the editing process often destroys the original artistic intention. However, there is no guarantee that the artistic intention would reach the reader as the artistic intention it was originally. It often happens that a project does not correspond to what was intended and thus alienates or bores the reader or generates bad comments about the work. This crossroads or dilemma is a structural necessity of literature, given that it is simultaneously art and entertainment, that is, not an object, nor a product, but also a commodity and a communication. Art is not a thing, as a commodity is a thing, so literature lives divided in an irreconcilable dual nature.
If the writer decides to be a content provider or an artist, her dilemma will dissipate. Unfortunately, this could mean giving up an original artistic impetus that would benefit the art world and literary history, or giving up a legibility that would guarantee sales and public recognition. Fortunately, the era of the avant-garde has passed, and it is possible to innovate without breaking with all the markers and structuring that are recognizably literary.
I divide myself into two writers, within myself. One aimed at the market, which has achieved a few results, such as three poems in an anthology and a short story in another anthology. And another highly experimental and free, writing things that would hardly be considered literary by any stretch of the term. Very pleasantly, the short story published in the anthology has some dose of experimentation within the possible limits of publishing, satisfying me in both dimensions simultaneously.
The anthology demanded short stories around a witch festival called Mabon. The tale consists of the advice of an older lady to a younger girl on how to prepare for the feast and to cope with the sexism of 1300s Islamic society. As such, it is by far the most original tale in the volume, standing apart from all the rest, in which there are more cinematic narratives with sorcery and more teenage-like texts about young people with magical powers.
Because the artist, if she really is an artist, also plays with the public space, with the imaginary of the population in general, with the commonplaces, she does not restrict herself to a solipsism of intentions, because that is to become, the artist herself, a commodity, in a pretended isolation that hides the immense plots of social relations under global capitalism. It is not necessary to write a literary text that looks more like a political party pamphlet, but it is necessary to understand the crystallization of languages perpetrated by capitalism that necroses the capacity to think differently. This is why a novel about a family drama can be more disruptive than science fiction about non-existent technologies and alien races of impossible geometries. As in dream analytics, what matters is not the apparent surface, but the latent meaning.
Many thanks for this insightful and interesting comment!