For the last goddamn time…
“Kill your darlings” means “if something is holding you back, get rid of it, even if it sounds pretty.”
That’s it! That’s all it means! It means if you’re stuck and stalled out on your story and you could fix the whole block by removing something but you’re avoiding removing that thing because it’s good, you remove that thing. That’s the darling.
It does NOT mean
- That you have to get rid of your self-indulgent writing
- That you should delete something just because you like it (?wtf?)
- That you need to kill off characters (??? what)
- That you have to pare your story down to the absolute bare bones
- That you have to delete anything whatsoever if you don’t want to
The POINT is that you STOP FEELING GUILTY for throwing out good writing that isn’t SERVING THE STORY.
The POINT is that you don’t get so HUNG UP on the details that you lose sight of the BIG PICTURE.
Good grief….
Also, you don’t have to like, delete it from existence. Keep a second document full of the Darlings. You never know when you’ll need it later.
Sometimes you can voltron all your darlings together into a single Mega Darling