Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.

Also,

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3985 - Kill Your Darlings - SoD Rep-1912- Writing Wednesday for 2601.14


A Sense of Doubt blog post #3985 - Kill Your Darlings - SoD Rep-1912- Writing Wednesday for 2601.14

I have mixed feelings about writing advice that some writers feel must be applied without flexibility.

As an individualist and a non-conformist (though sadly I have conformed more as I have grown older), I eschew rules.

Rules are made to be broken.

Show don't tell? Not all the time. Read a book. Sure, MOST of the time. The important things is knowing when to tell and how much. I am still trying to master this technique.

No "said bookisms." Well, that depends. A "said bookism" is something like "William lamented" rather than "William said." Or even, "William said, sadly" is a bit much. This one needs to be followed almost all the time. Btu just yesterday I wrote "the guard asked" and I don't regret it. I wouldn't have even used the tag since the question with the question mark makes clear that it's a question; however, there were many people in scene, and without the tag, it would have been unclear who had asked the question.

I remind you, dear reader, of two of my recent posts:

These contain a great deal of writing advice.

And then there's KILL YOUR DARLINGS, which I wrote about back in 2020 (and I am reprinting here, farther below).

KILL YOUR DARLINGS advises writers to cut the things they love best on the presumption that they may weaken the writing. I found this advice most useful in writing poetry and a bit less so for fiction, though not completely without merit.

But Brianna Sarovski disagrees.


I was searching for images to use for this post, and I found this wonderful author, a fantasy writer, who makes these advice posters in Victorian style. Very cool.

A good refutation to KILL YOUR DARLINGS.

Sometimes, it's the right thing to do; sometimes, it's not.

FIND YOUR VOICE.

Killing darlings will mute that voice.

But killing darlings is a revising thing (not really editing but people mix up those two all the time). It's not for the drafting process. Do not pre-edit too much, pre-revise. Be free and compose in a way that feels natural and good.

That's today's advice.

Thanks for tuning in.

Now new content on this topic (pretty good) and the reprinted content (less good, but decent).

New content:

https://reedsy.com/blog/kill-your-darlings/

Kill Your Darlings: A Guide to Ruthless Editing

Written by Savannah Cordova

The phrase “kill your darlings” means eliminating any part of your writing — characters, scenes, sentences, side plots — that, while you might love them, don’t serve your story. It’s often attributed to William Faulkner, though the earliest use comes from Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1916 book, On the Art of Writing. 

This can be a struggle for writers of all ages and experience. Who amongst us hasn’t grown overly attached to a beautiful turn of phrase, or an intricate scene we worked on for weeks? To help you find the best way to kill your darlings in the most humane way possible, let’s dive deeper into the meaning of the quote, and how you can apply its wisdom to your own writing process. 

If something doesn’t serve your story, it has to go

Let’s take a look at Arthur Quiller-Couch’s original advice:

If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: “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.”

First of all, notice how “kill your darlings” is an appropriately succinct variation on this long, somewhat dramatic quote. But also notice that Quiller-Couch doesn’t say avoid writing anything beautiful or extraneous at all costs. In fact, he encourages writers to give in to their impulses. Write it! Get all of those wonderful, ridiculous, and perhaps slightly unneeded ideas out of your system and onto the page. Don’t worry about whether it’s perfect. Being creative is already difficult, and it only gets harder if you’re constantly policing every sentence. Let your creativity run free and wild as you write your first draft. 

Knives out in the editing phase

Once the initial excitement has faded and you’re looking at a completed rough draft, that’s when you can take out the red pen and decide who or what to snuff out. Killing your darlings is less writing advice so much as it is advice on revising. It reminds you not to get attached to something just because you love it, even if it’s the finest piece of prose in your manuscript. Instead, consider whether it actually belongs.

And if you’re having a hard time finding or editing out the parts of your story that don’t work yourself, an editor can help you make the tough calls on your manuscript and identify what needs to be cut or changed.

Imagine you’re writing a story about a hard-boiled noir detective with a mysterious past. He takes on a new case that bears a stunning similarity to his wife’s unsolved murder. You include scenes where he reminisces about his wife while working on the case, as well as conversations with witnesses, potential suspects, and his wife’s sister. One of these is not quite like the others, however.

The detective may have an emotionally-loaded argument with his late wife’s sister, where she blames him for her sibling’s death. But the detective has already expressed his guilt about his perceived hand in her death and has suitably complied with genre conventions by drinking extreme amounts of alcohol to cope while beating himself up about it. Rehashing those feelings with the sister could be redundant, even if it’s one of the best confrontations you’ve ever written. It’s not moving the plot forward (i.e., helping us find our killer), and it’s not teaching us anything new about our protagonist. You should always feel free to write the scene, but during editing, that interaction might find itself on the execution block.

With a finished first draft in hand, you can start ruthlessly murdering anything that doesn’t serve a purpose in your story. Now the question is what, exactly, are darlings? The term applies to anything that bogs down your story unnecessarily, but there are a few things that you can specifically watch out for.

Watch out for purple prose

Clever turns of phrase and lush descriptions all have their time and place. Just be careful it doesn’t turn into flowery prose. This ornate and overwrought writing commonly disrupts the flow of the story. It looks good and sounds good, but its extravagance calls too much attention to itself. You want your readers to disappear into the world you’re creating, not be jarred by how it’s written. 

That isn’t to say you have to write like Ernest Hemingway. Emotional and atmospheric prose can be useful when the moment calls for it. The line between beautiful and purple is subjective, and depends on the needs of the story, the wants of the author, and the feedback of editors and beta readers. If you have a poetic writing style or feel like it suits the purpose of a scene (or the whole story), you can leave it be. But if the way something is written is noticeably at odds with the rest of your style or distracts from the main point, consider rewriting it. 

As an example, here’s a flowery passage that would give Hemingway a headache:

The sun traveled across the sky in an unerring arc, trembling with the stark inevitability of fate, burning the sparse grasses of the desert into the fine sands of time, sinking ever closer and closer to its daily mournful death. Beneath its uncaring regard, a man dressed entirely in the color of mourning made his dastardly escape across this barren land. Following in an endless, relentless pursuit, loaded down with steel, and darkness, and years of grief, was the gunslinger. 

In theory, Stephen King could have written the opening to The Gunslinger like this, but it probably would’ve made even his biggest fans concerned. This paragraph is long and overbearing, taking a very long time to get to one simple point. Amongst all the descriptions, the real point is lost. 

King actually started his story quite simply: 

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Short, punchy, and mysterious, this sentence is an enticing opening. The reader has many questions about who the man is, why he’s being chased, and the overall setting of the story. While the earlier paragraph might answer some of these questions, it has no intrigue. This short introduction instead immediately brings questions to the mind of the reader — questions they’re going to have to keep reading to answer. 

It’s not just the micro-level darlings that have to face the firing squad, either. Your scenes and chapters can pose problems as well. 

Make sure each scene pushes your story forward

On a more global scale, pay attention to what entire scenes and chapters add to your work. You might be fond of a scene where your characters indulge in a monologue on your favorite topic, or a chapter that deeply explores the background of your most beloved side character. But do they muddle the story and prevent it from moving forward? If you take it out and it changes nothing about the overall progression, you might be dealing with a darling. 

For example, romance novels rely on interactions between the main character and their love interest to increase the tension and drive the story — as well as their relationship — forward. Say you’re writing a Regency novel about two bachelors who are competing for the affection of a duchess, only to fall in love with each other along the way. 

Perhaps your research has given you a new appreciation for British men’s fashions of the early 19th century, so you include a detailed chapter where your hero, the Viscount, visits his tailor and makes decisions about his new wardrobe. While this may be interesting and could reveal something about his character, ultimately, it might not tell the reader much about the relationship between the two men or the plot. 

This doesn’t mean throwing out sections that are slow or go slightly off the beaten path. What you’re looking for are the parts that don’t fit your story at all or serve your main point, especially those sections that you might be a little too attached to. The same thing can happen with characters.

Cut or combine unnecessary tertiary characters

Perhaps the most literal darlings are your characters. In writing them, you’ve gotten to know them so well they might as well be friends. It can be painful to even consider getting rid of them. But you only have so much room on the page, and the more characters you have, the more difficult it can become to keep track of them — for you and your readers. This doesn’t apply to your main characters so much as the supporting cast.

It’s very common for this to happen in adaptations of books and fictionalized accounts of real-world events. The HBO miniseries Chernobyl, which chronicles the 1986 nuclear disaster, does this with one of its characters. Writer Craig Mazin needed a way to represent the many scientists who investigated the disaster — but he didn’t want to overload the audience with too many characters. So instead of portraying each individual scientist, he created a composite character, nuclear physicist Ulana Khomyuk, to serve as a stand-in for the many real people who worked on containing the incident.

Often, the roles played by two or three characters can actually be filled by one. Even if you really love the wacky neighbor and the main character’s comic relief best friend, if they serve a similar purpose, you can streamline your narrative by discarding one of them. Or you can combine them to create one character who plays multiple roles (a wacky best friend who lives next door!). 

If you’re feeling squeamish about all the brutal killing, don’t worry. There are less violent ways to kill your darlings.

Don’t kill them, find them a new home

Erasing something you put a lot of effort and emotion into is tough. The good news is you don’t have to! Treat it like an animal rescue instead. 

Rather than outright deleting them, make a separate document to transfer any darlings you find and keep them around for a rainy day. There’s obviously something you loved about that character or chapter. They can serve as inspiration for other projects and might even be useful later on in the same story. Just as a deleted scene can lead to a new book idea, a character cut from one project can be the star of another. 

The main character in Rainbow Rowell’s book, Carry On, was actually a fictional character in the universe of her earlier novel, Fangirl. Although Simon Snow is present in the fanfiction the main character of Fangirl is writing, Rowell doesn’t bring him to the foreground or use his story to parallel the main narrative. Instead, she channeled her love and curiosity for him into a spinoff series where she gets to explore everything she couldn’t in Fangirl. Simon’s second life proves that a beloved darling doesn’t have to go the way of the dodo — and can rise like a phoenix for a story entirely of their own.

Authors across genres and periods have extolled the virtues of killing one’s darlings. Though a critical editing eye is an important quality writers should cultivate, don’t let it keep you from fostering darlings in the first place. Have fun as you write, but keep a sharp implement handy during your editing process — and don’t be afraid to use it.



Reprinted content:

Wednesday, May 13, 2020



A Sense of Doubt blog post #1912 - How to KILL our darlings

For a while, I worked on making Wednesday's the writing day of the week on this blog with posts on writing and/or writers; sometimes, I posted my own writing.

In this time of the pandemic, I am trying to write fiction again, slowly and with my limited free time, but I am plugging away at it. In so doing, lessons of fiction writing is a thing dominating my consciousness, a lot.

I think I found this article at school in the class set up by my friend and colleague Abbie Leavens. I present it here with credit to its author Ruthanne Reid, even though watch for the BLOGGER NOTE where I interject in a place in which Reid does not make her point clearly.

https://thewritepractice.com/kill-your-darlings/

How to “Kill Your Darlings”
and Survive the Process
by Ruthanne Reid | 34 Comments
For those of us who’ve been in the writing biz a while, there is a quote by Stephen King we’ve all seen a thousand times (and if you’re new to writing, fear not: you’ll see this quote a thousand times, too).



“[K]ill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
Given that Stephen King writes horror, this might be a little misleading without context.
This will help: Stephen King was actually quoting William Faulkner, who said:
“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
― William Faulkner
Well, at least now we know we’re talking about writing not homicide.

What Are “Darlings” in Writing?

Quick: what’s a favorite line from a book you’ve read?
In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.
—The Hobbit
Anything could pop to mind.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—Anna Karenina 
It’ll be something you probably have memorized, or know well enough that you recognize even partial references. Something that gets your heart racing, your neurons sparking, your lips smiling.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
—One Hundred Years of Solitude
Just those words bring an entire world back to your memory.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
—1984
These favorite phrases please us. Our hearts surge when we read them.
It was a nice day. All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn’t been invented yet.
—Good Omens
We love the way these lines are worded, and we love the way they feel. The word “darling” has to do with endearment and affection; it’s applied to something beloved to you. It’s love with a smile, fond and warm.
The tricky thing is that our own writing has “darlings,” too, and when we love them that fondly, we lose all sense of objectivity.

What Is a “Darling” and Why Are They Dangerous?

Darlings, in writing, are those words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and even chapters that we are often most proud of. We love them, to the point that we almost don’t care if those bits are clear to readers or not. We love them, and we want to keep them.
The problem is they can get in the readers’ point of view.
[BLOGGER'S NOTE: The previous sentence is not clear. "get" in the readers' POV? How? Why? To what effect? What does this have to do with our love of our darlings and determination to keep them? The writer does not help the cause as the following sentence do not clarify very well what "get in the reader's POV" means. Yes, I switched to singular as the original should have been.]
Faulkner was right. King was right. The purpose of writing isn’t just for the writer; it’s for the reader, too, and so when we disregard the reader’s needs for the sake of our own, we do the reader a great disservice.
So how do you find these darlings?
Good news: it’s easier than you think.

How to Find the Darlings in Your Writing

Note: this advice builds on the foundation that you already have something of a writing community, even if it’s just a couple of people who beta-read for you. If you don’t, there’s no better time to find one; we are not meant to write in a vacuum.
Critique is never personal. When sane and healthy writers critique one another, they do it to help. The goal is to show what did and did not work; it’s not a statement of personal worth. However, when our written darlings are critiqued, we as writers tend to feel like we’ve been stabbed.
And, to quote the Bill Engvall, here’s your sign.
heresyoursign
If someone says a phrase/paragraph/chapter/sentence didn’t work for them, and in response you want to cry/scream/shout/throw something, it’s a good bet they tripped over one of your darlings.
This is hard. The thing a reader trips over usually makes perfect sense to us; it’s that “writer-brain” problem again. And of course, I’m not talking about the kind of phrase one person doesn’t understand and twenty people do; I’m talking about the one twenty people don’t understand and only you, the writer, grasp.
Yes. Those phrases/sentences/chapters/etc. have to go. They do.
BUT.
It isn’t a death sentence. You’ll find it a lot easier to handle your darlings if you follow the next simple steps.

What do Do About Your Darlings

Here is where I’m going to depart slightly from the quote that inspired this post in the first place: rather than “killing” your darlings (i.e., straight-up deleting them), I want you to copy them into a separate spare file and put them aside.
Here’s why:
Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
—Neil Gaiman
He’s onto something here.
In my experience, the best results I’ve had with passages readers don’t get is when I remove them from the original work, but not simply in a slash-and-burn technique.
First, I save them in a separate file. Seriously. It’s not hard:
  1. Open your story file.
  2. Cut the section that’s giving your readers trouble.
  3. Paste it into a spare file.
  4. Save that file—and close it.
Nobody is going to make you throw them away completely. Just knowing your beloved phrases don’t have to disappear completely takes a lot of pressure off.
See, you may still get to use those darlings—just not where you thought you could. Keep them, by all means, and leave the funerary wear in the closet. Just take your darlings out of the story in question.

Next Step After Your Darlings are “Dead”

So now what? You removed the offending section, and now there’s a hole in your manuscript.
The answer is probably predictable: time for hard work.
One: Re-read the section that came before the bit you cut (this is really important).
Two: Once you’ve done that, without hesitating, write a new version of the removed scene.
The reason you want to do it this way is because the flow of the story will be in your head. If you’re coming off the bit you wrote that worked, the words for the next section will flow like a river in a deep channel. It really only works best if you read what came before and then move into writing the missing bits, as if those bits weren’t missing at all, and you’re just continuing down the road.
Don’t be afraid. Write it fresh, and see what happens. I bet you sixteen oranges it comes out better.

Trust Your Readers—And Yourself

Your job as a writer is to remove roadblocks so your readers keep reading.
I know this is a seriously hard piece of advice. It’s so often the bits we feel are brilliant that need to go, or at least be re-worded.
Here’s the thing: you wrote that brilliant bit.
It was not a fluke. You wrote it because you have those words inside you.
That means you can do it again, even better.
Don’t be afraid. Trust your readers, and trust yourself. Kill (read: copy and paste) your darlings, without the fear that you’ll never write anything as brilliant again.
You will do it again, and your writing will only improve.
Are You Ready to Kill Your Darlings? Let’s talk about it in the comments section.

PRACTICE

Today, choose a passage that’s given your beta-readers trouble. First, copy the troublesome bit and put it in a separate file; second, delete it from your original manuscript. Third, re-read the bit that came before your deleted portion. Then, and only then, it’s time for the next step: rewrite it fresh, without stopping.
If you like, you can use a timer for fifteen minutes. However, this one doesn’t necessarily need to be timed. It just needs to be done.
In the comments below, share your new passage, and if you’re brave, explain what you changed. Don’t forget to comment on three other replies!
Ruthanne Reid
Ruthanne Reid
Would you believe this third-person intro is being written by the very same individual about whom it is written?

I know. Completely blows her mind, too.

Ruthanne Reid is one of those pesky fanfiction authors who made good, and thus eschews most labels. Except for being a Generation X-er (or maybe Xennial, according to some guy’s webpage), a musician who loves music but also carries a ton of baggage about it, a self-taught graphic artist who designs her own covers, a spoonie who wrestles Fibromyalgia not unlike yon Hercules and the Nemean lion, a Christian who hesitates to use the word because too many of them are crazy but Jesus is pretty great, a rabid shipper who’s too smart to lay out precisely which ships because of the wars, and an avid reader when she isn’t busy caretaking for some pretty ill folks.

You know. Unlabelable.

Currently a resident of Long Island City and a loving mom to one current cat and numerous future ones, Ruthanne is happily married to a fellow geek who loves good stories and great games as much as she does. Between the two of them, they own a lot of things that need to be plugged in.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2005.13 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1775 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2601.14 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3848 days ago & DAD = 503 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
Posted by at
Labels: , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)