"Kill your darlings" only applies if you're holding onto something that actually hurts your story. But jerks sometimes use "kill your darlings" as a weapon to try to break you. Don't wantonly kill what you love the most about your story. That's why you're writing it. Make it work.
lately iāve been seeing a ton of people *aggressively* failing to understand that ākill your darlingsā is specifically about like.. that scene you really like that doesnāt actually add anything, ruins the flow, etc..
and sometimes you canāt keep *every* joke, even if theyāre all funny!
Yes! That āI love this exchange but it doesnāt fit in where the conversation is goingā or āthis scene is delightful but itās bringing the story momentum to a standstillā. You love it, but it needs to go DESPITE your love, not because of it.
i saw someone recently trying to argue that KYD was bad because ānot every likeable character should have to die to make a story good and actually itās too similar to bury your gays and fridging womenā and i was like
?????
Iāve seen some WILD misunderstandings of ākill your darlingsā
Like to the point of people thinking that you have to remove ANYTHING in your story that youāre actually pleased with. No fun allowed!
This makes me so sad, because thereās nothing that motivates writing quite like self indulgence. Why deny yourself the most enjoyable part of writing, especially if youāre writing a doorstopper of a novel?
When I was editing my novelette, I had to kill two darling scenes, not because they didn't work, but because I had to take the story in a different direction. I mourned them and then I wrote their replacements ... which I loved even more fiercely that the ones I'd killed.
I've held onto that lesson.
When I wrote my thesis, I had a document called Graveyard of Murdered Darlings where I put all the genius parts that just didn't fit. It felt good to keep them and eventually forget them. RIP
I say toss em out for folks to enjoy. A fun vignette is like a bowl of nachos. Not much nourishment, but it makes some really old parts of your brain light up.
On KYD: I think Terry Gilliam`s movies suffer a bit from him being an overly self-endulgent storyteller, who just can`t get out of his own way.
Every movie of his is like the Swedish ship "Gustav Wasa" - so overly ornate, and poorly trimmed, that it capsizes immediately upon deployment.
