Killing your darlings: a how-to guide
Possibly the most tired writing advice is that you should be willing to kill your darlings. That beautiful passage you wrote when you felt completely inspired, those sentences that make you marvel at your own genius, kill them all. But how? And to what end? And how do you know when you’ve been ruthless enough? And how do you keep from destroying the soul of your story?
As a writer who started off as a poet, I found this advice extremely hard to accept, and nearly impossible to put into practice. To this day, if you ask me about the passages I love in Driving by Starlight, I’d have to talk about the way I described the desert and the night sky. The book went through four major revisions, but these passages survived every edit. I simply couldn’t let them go. Because they were connected to why I wrote the story in the first place. I didn’t want my story to be a hit-piece on a country that I had actually grown to love, a country that inspired me even while its politics stifled my voice.
The answer came to me, oddly enough, through my career in tech. When writing software, especially as part of a team, you can’t fall in love with your code. It goes through review, and will be changed almost as soon as it is submitted, by someone else. What matters about code is that it works, serves its purpose, and is as simple as possible so the next person looking at it is able to understand it immediately. Good code is virtually invisible.
In great stories, the writing is often invisible. Sure, there are some stories that manage to couple beautiful turns of phrase with an intricate plot, and that’s why there’s a whole genre of literary fiction. But those books are rare. They are the ones you hear about, the Booker Prize winners and the Oprah’s Book Club selections. But when you think of the stories that shape popular culture, the ones that turn into blockbuster movies, the entire genres of thrillers, sci-fi, romance and crime fiction, what stands out is the storytelling, not the language.
Accepting this—the primacy of story over language—can be a bitter pill to swallow. Especially when you grew up on Oscar Wilde and believe that some sentences may be worth dying for. But let’s say you’re willing to try it out, just for a little while, to see if it makes a difference. How do you do it?
Another lesson from software: version control. You don’t edit the code that’s “live” (already working in production). You make a copy of the code, make your changes in a sandbox, test them, and then submit them. And you don’t replace the working code with new code until you’re sure the new stuff works at least as well as what’s already live.
My writing folder is full of versions. Each document has a timestamp and a version number: v1, v2, v3… If I need to go back to the way things were three days ago, or three months ago, I can. I don’t feel scared or precious about trying out a change, because I’ll save it as a completely new file. And it’s not as if I am running out of space and need to delete old versions. So I don’t kill my darlings. They just sit in an archive. This gives me the freedom to try wildly dramatic edits without worrying about ruining anything. Feeling safe that I have “good” locked in allows me to reach for “great.”
A second trick that helps me is marking out the places where I’m particularly attached to the prose in bold before editing. I know I’m going to be precious about those sections, so I leave micro-editing them to the end. Editing can feel emotionally stressful, as if someone else is coming over to your house to rearrange your furniture and forcibly Marie Kondo your wardrobe. So it’s helpful to mark out the sacred places where your inner Marie Kondo needs to chill out, at least right now, until you build up more emotional fortitude. Let her do the kitchen first.
Below: some weapons to kill your darlings with.
Ultimately, the fear of killing your darlings comes from worrying that you’ll never write anything that good again. Over time, you’ll start to feel more confident, and moreover, start to see how your latest stuff is better than your early work. Then, I’d encourage you to try the wildest method of editing yet. Start a new, blank document, and write the entire story again, from the beginning. Does it sound crazy? I swear it can sometimes be easier than trying to hunt for your darlings in the burning garbage fire of your first draft.