DON’T KILL YOUR DARLINGS

There’s good writing advice, interesting writing advice, iffy writing advice, and then there’s terrible, awful, spirit- and creativity-destroying writing advice, and the worst example of the latter category is “Kill your darlings.” What makes this nonsense so bad is how often and irresponsibly it’s repeated.

Often attributed to Dylan Thomas, sometimes William Faulkner (who, if he followed this advice himself would have killed The Sound and the Fury in its entirety), and then repeated by other teachers and authors including Stephen King. In reality the concept seems to have first been belched forth by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in a series of Cambridge Lectures about 110 years ago. Never heard of him? Neither have I. Maybe that’s because of his darling-free writing.

Whoever started it, it goes something like this:

If you find you’ve written something you just love, that makes you feel as though you were born to do this, that you’ve found the heart and soul of it, delete that immediately and without further consideration because if you love it that much it can only be self-indulgent crap that no one else but you will like.

What a spectacular load of bullshit.

If you feel that anything you wrote—a sentence, a paragraph, a scene, a chapter, or a whole series of novels—is something you just love, makes you feel as though you were born to do this, that you’ve found the heart and soul of it, that’s the part you keep.

If you do wonder if maybe this bit here could be a little, okay… I don’t know… maybe self-indulgent crap that no one else but you will like, or maybe even understand, then okay, listen to that still, small voice and delete it. But if you do feel that way about something you’ve written how could it be considered a “darling”?

If you’ve been damaged enough by this maybe well meaning but tragically terrible piece of advice, please go back and put your darlings back in. Every last goddamn darling. And keep writing those darling with the goal of a whole book that’s nothing but non-stop fucking darlings.

Kill your darlings?

No!

Nurture your darlings. Protect your darlings. Publish your darlings.

If you don’t like what you’ve written, if it doesn’t resonate with you, why would you think it would resonate with anyone else? Why would you keep that and throw away what you love? It’s insane to even consider that.

Will everyone who reads it feel the same way? Well, you have no idea and no control over that—welcome to being a writer. But an equal number of people will dislike your writing sans darlings, and I’ll go you one farther: even more people will dislike darling-free writing.

This is creative writing, y’all. We’re not writing business memos or legal briefs. If you kill your darlings, what do you have left? Acquaintances? Passersby?

Nothing?

Never, ever, ever, kill your darlings.

Ever.

—Philip Athans

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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model.

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