Kill Your Darlings
The writing principle of cutting passages the author loves but that do not serve the story.
Last updated"Kill your darlings" is the principle that writers must be willing to cut passages, characters, scenes, or phrases they personally love when those elements do not serve the story. The advice is most commonly attributed to William Faulkner ("In writing, you must kill all your darlings"), though variations appear from Arthur Quiller-Couch, Stephen King, and others. The core insight is that a writer's attachment to their own cleverness can become the enemy of the work's quality. A beautiful sentence in the wrong place is still a flaw.
Stephen King discusses this principle extensively in On Writing, describing the pain of cutting scenes he loved because they slowed the narrative. When adapting The Shining, Stanley Kubrick cut vast swaths of King's novel, including backstory King considered essential, producing a leaner, more terrifying film. F. Scott Fitzgerald cut an entire subplot from The Great Gatsby at his editor's urging, material he had labored over for months. The resulting novel is 50,000 words of crystalline precision, and those cuts are a significant reason why.
The practical challenge is identifying your darlings in the first place. They are often the passages you are most proud of, the ones you reread with satisfaction, the ones you defend most vigorously when a reader suggests cutting them. That defensiveness is itself a diagnostic clue. When revising, ask of every passage: does this advance the plot, deepen character, or establish essential atmosphere? If the honest answer is "no, but I love how it sounds," it is a darling, and it should go. Save it in a separate file if you must, but remove it from the manuscript.