KIlling Your Darlings

Paula has ‘killed her darlings’!

Several years ago, when I first heard the phrase ‘Kill Your Darlings’, I thought it referred to the characters an author killed off. Since I don’t write murder stories, or thrillers where characters are bumped off in a variety of gruesome ways, I thought it was something I didn’t need to think about.

However, it appears the phrase originated with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch who wrote: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

He was referring to passages that you may think represent some of your best writing. I’m not sure I really have any of those, but I think it can equally refer to killing words, paragraphs, scenes, and even chapters in your story that aren’t necessary, even though you may have sweated blood over them while writing your first draft.

I had plenty of experience of this during the first dead-end drafts of ‘Irish Intrigue’. A scene where the heroine slips and breaks her ankle had to go as it proved too ‘inconvenient’ for her to be immobilised for the next few week. Similarly a Christmas Eve scene also had to go because it brought the hero and heroine together much too quickly. Although I loved both those scenes, they simply didn’t work with the rest of the story – so I had to kill them (but I’ve kept them in a separate file just in case I want to use them sometime in the future).

As well as deleting scenes that don’t work, there are also the scenes that aren’t necessary. I deleted several of these in ‘Irish Intrigue’. Two were of the heroine interacting with the hero’s two children. I thought they were necessary to show her growing relationship with them – but did the scenes need to be so long? One of them covered over two pages. Highlight and delete – ouch! I loved the scene, but managed to convey what was necessary in half a page.

Conversations, too, can be cut or at least shortened. My characters do have a tendency to rabbit on, and my huge word cull for ‘Irish Intrigue’ showed me plenty of occasions when I could cut unnecessary chunks from their conversations. In one case I deleted a whole phone conversation between my heroine and her best friend. I thought I needed it to show the heroine’s confusion and conflicted feelings, but it was actually just a rehash of information and feelings the reader already knew.

My mantra became: Does this add anything to the story or to the characters? Is it absolutely necessary? If not, out it went. I won’t say I didn’t have some regrets at times, but ‘killing my darlings’ did in the end make the story sharper and faster-paced, and I learned a lot from doing this which I hope will stand me in good stead for future stories.