JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #50
April 29, 2021
Today I want to talk about the advice to "kill your darlings." There are a lot of ways to think about this advice, and I’ve seen it brought up in a lot of different contexts to varying levels of usefulness. I think at its heart the advice is meant to remind us that sometimes we have to cut the things from our stories that we love the most. The point is this: we can’t use how much we like something as a metric for whether or not it needs to stay in the story.
This can get more complicated when we ask for feedback in a workshop or from a friend. Every reader brings something different to a story, so when you share a story with other people, you’ll often get conflicting feedback. Sometimes the most difficult feedback to address is when people tell you they each like a different part of the story. Obviously, this is an honest reaction from everyone, and emotional reactions are sometimes the best feedback we can get for a story. It can help us figure out what works best or what misfired. However, we should be careful not to interpret "I like such-and-such" as "don’t cut that!"
Knowing that some specific scene or detail or line of prose has had a clear impact on a particular reader sometimes makes us as writers attach more strongly to that part of the story, and it becomes a "darling," something that we become loath to cut, or, worse, something around which we begin to reshape the story, trying to make that one piece stand in as the total effect. Unfortunately, it can sometimes be the case that the thing our early workshop readers point out as their favorite part actually needs to be cut. And sometimes their praise can blind us to that need.
To "kill your darlings" is partly to recognize that you can cut out a lot of good stuff from a story and leave behind the better stuff. Readers who tell us they really like a particular aspect of a story aren’t wrong that it might be good, but this feedback is exactly the kind of situation the advice to kill our darlings is meant to brace us for. No matter how attached we are to some part of a story, it might be just the thing we need to cut, and when we realize that, we have to kill our darling without regret.
Someone pointed out they keep all their "dead darlings" in a document "for future recycling," to which I replied:
Which is worse: killing your darling, having a funeral, grieving, and moving on; or, killing your darling, freezing the body, and holding on to hope for their eventual resurrection every time you visit the mummified corpse?
Why, the latter, of course! Entire cultures have been built around it!