According to Forrest Wickman at Slate, the term “murder your darlings” or “kill your darlings,” an oft-quoted, time-honored chestnut for writers, is often attributed to William Faulkner or Allen Ginsberg. More likely the lesser-known Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose lectures on the art of writing had a wide readership, got the expression going, and many more famous voices have reiterated it since then.
Personally, I like Stephen King’s variation. It doesn’t seem it could be more emphatic, unless perhaps you add profanity to really drive the point home:
I’ve been a professional medical writer for nearly 16 years, and alongside this corporate gig I’ve developed a robust creative freelance life, publishing poetry, essays, and articles at a pretty regular clip. But I’m in the process of going over my essay collection, and it’s only occurred to me recently that the “take no prisoners” stance I have when it comes to darlings at my corporate job (especially when other people favor them!) has somehow not translated fully into my freelance life. I wonder how many ASJA writers might experience this kind of disconnect—we wear many hats and may forget to apply our hard-won lessons to our whole range of roles.
I’m now murdering my pet phrases with delightful regularity. This heightened kill rate came from relearning a few things that first became apparent at my day job:
- Certain sentences or paragraphs are spared a strikethrough because they serve as the author’s shorthand for a highly personal memory. If you put yourself in the reader’s shoes and can’t find something that’s pretty universally understandable or recognizable, it’s time to send those words to the cutting room floor.
- Having an honest and objective reader is invaluable. We all need the kind of person that tells us the phrases we thought were cute or clever actually fall flat or convey something else entirely.
- Reading your own pieces out loud, preferably after some healthy time away from the draft, can’t be oversold. In my case, printing a hard copy that I can mark up as I read seems to help, too. The tangible components of this process helps me recognize when I’ve been seduced by a pretty alliteration, when in fact the text doesn’t really say much of value. I know I am in a sufficiently murderous zone when I stop my out-loud review to say things like, “Now, what exactly does that mean?”
So there you have it. Murder isn’t just for true crime writers or weavers of mystery and suspense. Be swift and mercifully vicious with your darlings and it will work out better for all concerned.