In his memoir On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King famously wrote: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”1
Of course, SK is talking about editing your own work. It’s an exhausting part of the writing process. It requires you to painstakingly tiptoe through your writing, willing to excise anything useless, boring, or, sometimes, just not quite right. It isn’t always enough to just delete a word or phrase that doesn’t quite get the job done. Sometimes a whole chapter has to be cut.
Sometimes—too frequently, actually—I’ll fall in love with some piece of my writing while I’m rereading it for editing. I’ll remember its origins, and how it looked so bland when I first put it down on paper. I’ll recall how, after days of spending time with it, nurturing it, helping it become what it wanted to be, it was finally done. And it is beautiful.
Then, Reality kicks the door in. “That no longer fits with the larger story,” Reality might say. “Kill it! Kill your darlings.”
“No!” I scream. “I can still make it work.” Then the negotiations: “ Let me take another stab at it. What if I add a paragraph here?”
But I know Reality is right. So, late at night, after all the other words have gone to bed, I’ll open the document, highlight the section and quickly press Delete.
So, I present here a sacrifice to the writing process, an offering to the writing gods: 747 of my darlings, each too beautiful to be forever lost and forgotten in the cold depths of my computer.
This scene was originally part of A Matter of Magnitude, the second book of The Ahbta Legacy. It ultimately didn’t fit the structure of the novel, but I liked it too much to let it disappear.
The chapter is about a boy and his …, well, you should read it. It’s titled “A Boy and His Dog.”
- King borrowed the phrase from William Faulkner, who in turn traced the idea to British writer and critic Arthur Quiller-Couch, who wrote in a 1914 lecture: “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.” ↩︎