Kill Your Darlings

In the writing community we often hear the advice kill your darlings, but this doesn’t really explain what a writer needs to do to improve their writing. So, let’s explore this further, shall we?

This advice simply means don’t become so attached to your writing that you are incapable of removing unnecessary elements from it.

You don’t need or want to remove everything you love because this will remove the energy from your writing, but you need everything you leave in the book to move it forward and this is regardless of whether you write fiction or nonfiction.

Some things to keep a lookout for

Character: if you have a character that only appears once or twice in your story really think about whether this character moves the story forward or if they add anything of value to the story. If the answer is they add some light comedy but don’t move the story forward you may be better off removing the character or combining two characters into one.

Prose: this refers to the prose that stands out for one reason or another. If it isn’t like any of the other writing in the book, it will stand out and distract the reader. To avoid this it will need to be written in the same style as the rest of the book or removed. If the prose doesn’t add anything to characterisation, story momentum or information that the reader needs to know, the book will be better off without it.

So if your beloved darling is a scene that has no revelation, a character with no motive, or information that you spent heaps of time researching but is off-topic from your subject, you may find deleting it improves your manuscript.

How you can make the murder of your darlings easier

The best way to kill your darlings is to simply take them out of your current work-in-progress and place them in a new document. I call this document the ‘graveyard’. When I finish working on the current project I dig through the ‘graveyard’ for bones of inspiration.

These bones may be opening lines, scenes, characters or information that no longer work for the current manuscript but may be just what I need for a future manuscript. I take these snippets and put them in a folder I refer back to for inspiration when I become stuck or want to start a new manuscript.