Killing your darlings is an expression to denote the act of getting rid of parts of your writing that aren’t working, despite your liking for them. This happens more than you think—you write this beautiful scene that you just can’t get enough of; you’re proud of yourself. It’s perfect, you think. But then when you get to editing, you or someone you trust recommends that you get rid of it. You’re disheartened. How could someone not see the beauty in it? Plenty of writers will face this predicament. For your writing to reach its fullest potential, you have to get rid of things that you otherwise really want to keep.
Why is it Important to Kill Your Darlings?
You need to kill your darlings for a number of reasons. Sometimes, a scene you inserted just doesn’t make any sense to keep. It disrupts the flow of the novel; there’s too much exposition and no relevance to the main plot. It’s distracting, tangential. Better to get rid of it or find a better place for it.
Sometimes it’s the characters of a sequence of dialogue you don’t need. Ask yourself, does this character really contribute to the story in a consequential way? Or do they just kind of exist without relevance? Many writers, like myself, tend to overwrite. There’s a clear excess in everything from dialogue to description. But it’s easier to get rid of things than to add, so look at it as getting better practice. You will eventually learn to tame your excesses and use them when appropriate.
Ideas aren’t gold. An idea on its own isn’t brilliant or original. It’s your execution that makes it worth something. Writers often get obsessed with the idea they’ve come up with; it’s like a dirty secret. We can do the same thing for parts of our stories; but ideas come and go. You will finish it and start something else. You will have more; you will write other brilliant scenes. Getting rid of some of them isn’t the worst thing. And you can save them; they don’t just disappear into the abyss.
How to Kill Your Darlings
Here’s a general guide that you can use to decide if a scene, character, or other element should stay in your story, or if you should axe it.
1. Take some time away from your story
First, you need to be objective when you edit. You need to be ruthless. You will have to understand that you are perhaps going to dislike parts of your story, that you will need to redo things, change things, and remove things. This is part of the process. There’s no way around it. So, a good way to make sure you’re being objective is to first take some time off before you get into editing. A month works for me.
2. Ask yourself if it serves your story
A lot of editing is intuitive. You’re sensing what works and what doesn’t. If you read something and feel attached to it, stop and ask yourself how what you’re reading serves the story. When we’re feeling attached to our writing, it’s often an indication that we aren’t willing to let it go. But remember, sometimes we have to. If you love something let it go, right? When something serves the story, it creates/adds stakes; propels the narrative forward; introduces/enhances conflict; complicates things (for the better); forces the characters to take action.
3. Remove the scene and see what happens
Ask yourself what would happen if you removed the scene/sequence, if you’re not sure about axing it or not. You could, just to see how it feels, remove it and assume the information you wrote was missing from the text. If it ends up making sense, and the ‘feel’ of the story stays the same, then you’re probably better off without it. There’s a rule in screenwriting that can sometimes apply to novel writing sometimes: start the scene as late as possible and end it as soon as possible. Everything else is excess.
4. Combine characters
If you’re thinking about removing more than one character who doesn’t add anything to the story, you could combine them. Make them a single character. Combining them would mean synthesizing their traits, giving them a new purpose and goal, but retaining a sense of each of their personalities. Secondary and tertiary characters are sometimes interesting, but they don’t improve the story. This can be frustrating for the reader because unless they are extremely funny or interesting, scenes involving them are likely to bore them. But you might have an affinity for these characters because you can see their potential to influence the story; in this case, turn two into one.
Conclusion
Killing your darlings means exercising discretion. Sometimes, you don’t have to kill anything. Just repurpose what you already wrote. Editing is a complicated task, and you won’t always know what to do with certain things. This is why it’s important to think critically and use some of the tools above to help you make hard decisions that will hopefully improve your story.
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