It’s been widely attributed to William Faulkner - ‘kill your darlings’ - and according to Slate magazine, also to Wilde, Welty, Chesterton, Chekhov and Ginsburg, while Stephen King did actually say, ‘Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.’
It has many descendants, including Elmore Leonard’s ‘if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it’. But what does ‘murder your darlings’ mean?
The Bonfire of the Vanities?
Let’s not be so Puritan as to assume that anything on their pages that a writer delights in is by definition sinful, and fit only to be hurled onto Savanarola’s purifying bonfire of the vanities. King might accuse Dorothy L. Sayers’ avatar Harriet Vane of egotism but I don’t, when in Gaudy Night she says to Peter Wimsey,
‘When you get the thing dead right and know it’s dead right, there’s no excitement like it. It’s marvellous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.’
I know that feeling - for a bit, anyhow - and so, I bet, does every writer reading this post. It is dead right.
Instead, let’s be very Protestant in going back to the original text, which in this case is actually by Arthur Quiller-Couch, in his 1913-14 lectures On the Art of Writing. In ‘On Style’, he says
Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament … 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.’
Slate calls Q ‘lesser known’ but he was a prolific professional author and critic and a massive seller and so, like many such writers, he’s well worth listening to.
For Q, a ‘darling’ is clearly a much narrower category than ‘anything you particularly love’. But the way writers have since picked it up points towards a genuinely useful idea. Sure, ‘ornament’ seems to imply fancy elaboration, but ornaments, however fancy, are sometimes essential: of the essence in that context. Think of the crown that denotes royal authority, or an embroidered robe offered to thank a saint for their aid.
The crucial word, surely, is extraneous: Q is talking about an element in a piece of writing which is not part of the essence of what the piece is for and about: not necessary to how it works. Even then, he acknowledges that the best way to deal with that urge is to indulge it - to let it into the first, ‘for yourself’ draft, if you like - but then to cut it for your reader. Personally, I call that process writing.
But how do you tell what is a darling?
‘Why this? Why Here?’
So your Inner Editor is trucking along through your text, and comes on some element that triggers a twinge of doubt. So it asks your Inner Writer, ‘Why this? Why Here? I’m not sure it serves the storytelling?’:
If your Inner Writer answers, ‘No, it doesn’t, does it!’, you would cut that bit of writing without a second thought.
If your Inner Writer answers, ‘Yes, because …’ and the reason is convincing, the twinge melts away and your Inner Editor moves on.
But if your Inner Writer hedges, ‘No, but yes. It’s there because—’ then even though the IW recognises the doubt, they may well not want the IE to cut it. It does, after all, have a reason for existing.
Much of this kind of dialogue between Inner Editor and Inner Writer may go on at the barely-conscious level: you may well only ‘hear’ the reason you are keeping it, not the editorial unease which triggered the question.
And yet the next time your Inner Editor meets this element - or your beta-reader does - they’ll hear the clunk and ask again, ‘Why this? Why here?’.
‘No, but yes,’ says your Inner Writer again. ‘It’s there because—’
In other words, you know you’ve got a Darling when you keep finding yourself having to re-justify a certain element, and re-persuade yourself that it should stay.
How Do Things Become Darlings?
Why do we keep re-justifying these phrases, facts, descriptions or characters, when the very fact that we do so should be telling us that something’s amiss?
It’s usually because we either particularly enjoy what this thing is doing and don’t want to lose that, or because it cost us a lot to write, which unconsciously we don’t want to ‘waste’ by ditching it.
You particularly enjoyed writing it, because it was fun wrangling the words to nail an idea or phenomenon which you want to express - which is to say, something you want to have be heard by others.
You particularly enjoyed writing it, because it’s a style or voice you particularly enjoy reading.
It mentions or evokes a love of yours: a favourite book, artist, place or band, a phrase, saying, concept or fact(oid), a real-life person you want to bring alive - or skewer!
It cost you a lot to write, and you don’t want to ‘waste’ what you spent
financially - that travel, that course, or that expensive book
practically - all that research
psychologically - a topic that’s close to the bone for you
emotionally - it was difficult and distressing, and perhaps cathartic, to write
temporally - it took huge amounts of your precious writing time and energy
Your delight in it is not about storytelling, but in what it says about you: that you’re the kind of writer who writes like this, or the kind of person who thinks like that. A little enquiry into the parts of you which want to be perceived like that, or are afraid of not being perceived like that, should point towards the reason you don’t want to let go of this thing.
Someone said it was a good idea to put that element in because
it’s in fashion
it’s original
no one’s doing it
it won’t offend anyone you don’t want to offend
it will offend someone you want to offend or enjoy offending
agents and editors are saying they like this kind of thing
it’s what Mantel/Stephen King/Dickens/Bestseller McMillionsface/Litry McPrizewinnerface does
A Darling may be not a thing you’re doing, but a thing you’re avoiding doing
Don’t forget, though, that your darling may instead be a not-doing: you’re not explaining something so as to ‘build intrigue’; you’re not giving this character a parent because your parent will be convinced it’s them; you’re refusing to make the most plausible plot-move, because ‘it feels clunky’.
For example, for years in writing The Mathematics of Love, I resisted having Anna in the 1976 strand find or read the letters that Stephen wrote in the 1819 strand. But for some beta-readers, the many, many connections and echoes of settings, themes, character and psychology that I’d woven in were not enough. They went on expecting a practical and plot connection to emerge, so they spent the whole novel waiting for Anna to read the letters and for her actions to be shaped by doing so. But she didn’t and they weren’t. That was because I couldn’t face doing what I thought of as a clichéd ‘dusty letters in the attic’ manoeuvre. And for me and others of my readers, those connections and echoes were enough, in themselves, so I stuck with that.
How do you tell if a darling is nonetheless earning its keep?
And yet there are always things in our writing which cost us a lot, or read particularly well, or are busy helping our novel to fit into a particular category, which are also fully earning their keep as storytelling. So how do you tell the difference?
I think the best test is whether, as well as the aspect of this possible darling that pleases you, it’s doing something else worth doing, that couldn’t be done better by another means.
This is a subset of my general principle for really good writing, which is that every sentence, every paragraph, every scene, should be doing at least two jobs: should be contributing to the storytelling in at least two ways. As the great photographer Minor White said, ‘One should not only photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are.’
One of those jobs is probably the denotation: ‘what they are’, the basic meaning that the words transmit. The other job, the ‘what else they are’, will probably be doing something like one of these:
evokes a character’s personality or state of mind
adds to the atmosphere or fills out the setting
moves the characters’ (emotional, psychological) journey on a little
drops a ‘sweet’ of a specific detail in for the reader to pick up, the story-purpose of which may only come clear later
makes the reader laugh, cry or think, without derailing the story
clarifies or emphasises the structure
enriches or counterpoints the moment with connotations, images and themes
develops or complicates the ideas about a specific topic or theme, which are building through the story
If your possible darling is decently written and doing at least one of those second things - and more would do no harm! - then it may well be that broadly speaking it’s earning its keep. But the fact that your Inner Editor is still bothered by it shows that at the moment it’s not working as well as it needs to. So what do you do?
What do you do about a darling?
First, with your new insight into how it’s become a darling, ask again, ‘Why this? Why here? What does this bring to my storytelling?’
If the answer is a blindingly clear ‘nothing’, or at least nothing that isn’t also being done elsewhere, then cut it.
If it’s doing its first job well, but has no second job, glare at it, and the context/characters/themes of this part of the novel, till you work out what it else it could and therefore should be doing. Then do that.
If it’s doing its second job well, while your Inner Editor persists in telling you that its first job feels clunky or too dominant, then try one of these:
Condense the actual words, so you still get the second effect but the element as a whole doesn’t take up so much space in the storytelling. The ‘indulge it wholeheartedly’, in Q’s idea, it seems to me, could be a way to find out if any aspect of it is worth saving like this.
Ask yourself if the answer to ‘Why this? Why here'?’ is actually, ‘Yes, this, but not here’: these characters do need to have this row, but much later - or earlier - in their relationship.
Think up a different scenario/character/situation which will do that second job just as well, but without the bad fit of the current element. I think of this as ‘finding the ram in the thicket’.
Think up a different scenario which does a different job which is just as valuable. For example, faced with clear feedback that too many readers spent too much of The Mathematics of Love waiting for Anna to read Stephen’s letters and be changed by them, and it never happened, I had to find a way to reconcile myself to it happening. Fortunately, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to create a whole plot-machinery for her to find the damn dusty trunk, beause the most likely form for Anna to get hold of them was as Xerox photocopies. In a novel which is rooted in photography and time, and how light writes itself on things, that was both less clunky, and far more thematically satisfying - and (as happens very often) it gave me a scene which strengthened her connection with an important secondary character.
Remember that when something isn’t working a different solution is to do it more and more wholeheartedly. For example, if a couple of pages of gorgeous writing stick out like a sore thumb because they don’t advance the story, does that in fact mean you should allow yourself to write like that all the time, while teaching yourself to keep the story going all through this richer voice? If a minor character is taking up too much space, should they perhaps not be cut but have a bigger role in the story?
Decide to leave it in. It’s your book, your call. The darlings that are written out of passionate love (as opposed to the ones written out of a checklist of What Agents Are Looking For This Week) are likely to be some of your most authentic, you-ish writing. Maybe that’s a good enough reason?
What can darlings teach you about (your) writing?
There’s a macho relish to so much about the ‘kill your darlings’ rhetoric - not least Stephen King’s version. And I get it, I really do: the cleansing, salt-scrub pleasures of de-cluttering and spring-cleaning. But so much of the discourse also makes me cross, because its crudity is as likely to provoke furious resistance or defensive despair, as compliance - and neither of those will end in good writing either.
Sure, if the red Darling flag has popped up over something, don’t let me stop you scrubbing that darling away. But if you recognise that some darlings are things written out of your love or desire for your writing to be a certain way, that tells you something fundamental about why you love writing. And understanding more about your writing self is never a bad thing.
Thanks Emma, for another useful article on writing. It's so easy for darlings to creep in and they do often cause a jolt because they seem out of style or they break the dream. You've gone a step further as I can't recall ever coming across a 'Checklist for Whether A Darling is Earning its Keep'. The list is so useful for editing I'm going to handwrite it, memorise it, type it, save on the computer, print and pin! Thank you!