"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.
This particularly applies if you're writing from your perspective as a member of an underrepresented community. Your "darlings" might be the fact that your characters are of your background. Don't let jerks make you change that for their comfort.
lately i’ve been seeing a ton of people *aggressively* failing to understand that “kill your darlings” is specifically about like.. that scene you really like that doesn’t actually add anything, ruins the flow, etc..
and sometimes you can’t keep *every* joke, even if they’re all funny!
Yes! That “I love this exchange but it doesn’t fit in where the conversation is going” or “this scene is delightful but it’s bringing the story momentum to a standstill”. 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 “not every likeable character should have to die to make a story good and actually it’s too similar to bury your gays and fridging women” and i was like
?????
I’ve seen some WILD misunderstandings of “kill your darlings”
Like to the point of people thinking that you have to remove ANYTHING in your story that you’re actually pleased with. No fun allowed!
This makes me so sad, because there’s nothing that motivates writing quite like self indulgence. Why deny yourself the most enjoyable part of writing, especially if you’re 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.
So, so true. Not often, but it does happen. E.B. White used to struggle with this.
The only way you can figure out which it is is through many years of practice.
100%. I've found the longer I've done it, the more I've realized that it's not about not failing -- it's about failing faster. And then getting on with it.
It has taken me years to get over someone who used to do that to me. I am finally making the stories I wanna make how I want to make them and readers are resonating with those stories.
🔥_🔥
So important to remember.
I also would like to add that sometimes constructive criticism is actually wrong. You don’t actually need to accept story notes if you don’t want to.
Also, writing advice is just that—advice. They’re not mandatory laws that will cause you to be exiled if you don’t rigidly follow every last one. Pick & choose which ones you find helpful based on what kind of story you want to tell, & don’t be afraid to break them for dramatic effect!
Thank you for saying this. I DETEST that advice, as much for its violence as for its common misinterpretation. I've seen too many writers pre-edit themselves because of it, and then never finish the work.
with me its usually an exchange that I had in my head since the beginning and there's never the right place to use it. Which is good, it means the story is progressing with purpose and not so random that this particular darling can make it in.
Audience side, but I was already on the fence about continuing to watch The Walking Dead after Glenn but when I saw the showrunner say 'at this point we're trying to break our fans' I was out. Why would I want characters suffering and dying for no actual reason? Give me relevant plot.
Yes. To put it in a historical context, cavemen wouldn't indiscriminately kill their children. They loved their children! They would only kill Derrick, whose cries were attracting rabid angry mammoths and sabretooth tigers.
I see what you're saying, but that's not Kill Your Darlings. Darlings are scenes, not characters.
Derrick gets to live, he just gets all his dialogue left in the Cutting Room.
Darlings CAN be characters. You might be fond of a character, they might be an expression of something you value, but if they don't contribute anything to the story (which might be difficult to realise), they need to go (or maybe merged with another character).
And if nothing about your story feels darling to you, you're writing the wrong story!
Good darling-killing is cutting the bits where you're trying to be a cleverpants. Those bits are often overstrained. But the bits that really mean something need to stay in.
