I alluded to this in my last post and thought I better elaborate.

‘Kill your darlings’ is advice from William Faulkner; the full quote is (supposedly, but different versions exist) “In writing, you must kill your darlings”. Gee, thanks for qualifying with that ‘in writing’ bit, Will, otherwise who knows what kind of serial murdering spree you might have set off by desperate writers prepared to follow any advice to get published.

(Not to get too diverted, but originally the phrase was ‘murder your darlings’, and it came from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings”.)

It can be taken at face value to mean kill off your favourite characters, but in general what it is taken to refer to, as the Sir Arthur quote makes clear, is those bits of your writing that you really, really like. If you like them, it means you can’t be objective about them. If you’re not objective about them, it means you can’t judge them. If you can’t judge them, it means they’re probably not nearly as good as you’d like to think.

I agree that it’s important to not get so attached to scenes or dialogue that you can’t bring yourself to cut them for the sake of the overall story (never ‘cut’; just copy and paste into a scraps file and save for another story). There’s also the danger of falling in love with a particular phrasing and then failing to see that it doesn’t make the point you need it to make; your attachment obscures your message. That’s why it is important to have an editor, an independent first reader, or at the very least a long gap between writing and editing.

However, I do not agree with the generalisation/over-use of this advice: that you should cut things just because you like them – stupidity! If you cut the things you like, you’ll cut the things your audience will like.

In my case, I write for myself – I write the books I personally would like to read, with strong female characters, and a bit of romance but not too much, and lots of dialogue but not much description, especially of the weather or what people are wearing or what furniture is in a room. If I cut everything just because I liked it, I’d have nothing left, not even the sad bits where characters die because I like those bits too.

The underlying ethos, I think, is more damaging. There’s this assumption there that if you enjoyed writing a scene, that means it was too easy, which means it’s not any good. In the talk by Terry Pratchett that I linked to in the last post, he repeatedly talks about how much he enjoyed writing particular scenes. It doesn’t mean they were easy for him – something can be hard but still enjoyable – but it does mean he had fun writing them, and isn’t one of the great things about pTerry the sense of fun he has, still, after 25 years of Discworld?

Writing is allowed to be enjoyable. Even if you’re writing literary fiction, you’re allowed to admit that it’s enjoyable (unfashionable, I know): not easy, but fun.

Editing can also be enjoyable, if in a different way (seeing the diamond begin to shine out), but if you’re going into edit mode with ‘kill your darlings’ guiding your hand too literally, you’re going in to cut out all the warmth and spirit of the book. Perhaps ‘just mess your darlings up a bit into they fall into line and serve the story properly’ would be better advice.

This is the latest in semi-ongoing series about misapplied writing rules. The others are linked below:
Write what you know
Cut 10% in editing
Avoid adjectives and adverbs
Show, don’t tell
Just keep writing