Kill Your Darlings in Fiction
Quick answer: Kill your darlings means cutting the passages you love most when they no longer serve the story. Here is where the phrase came from and how to cut well.
Kill your darlings is the editor's blunt instruction to cut the sentences, scenes and characters you are proudest of whenever they stop serving the story. In other words, your affection for a passage is not evidence that it belongs. The advice sounds brutal because it is aimed at a real weakness: writers protect their favourite material long after it has become dead weight, precisely because it cost them something to write.
The phrase lives in revision. Nobody expects you to murder anything in a first draft, where enthusiasm is the whole engine. It becomes relevant the moment you reread your manuscript with a colder eye, asking not whether a paragraph is good but whether this story needs it. Short fiction, with its unforgiving word counts, is where the advice bites hardest.
Where the phrase actually comes from
The line is routinely credited to William Faulkner, Oscar Wilde and half a dozen others, but the traceable source is Arthur Quiller-Couch, the Cambridge lecturer whose 1914 talks on style were published as On the Art of Writing. His version was "murder your darlings", and his target was ornamental fine writing: whenever you produce a passage that strikes you as exceptionally brilliant, he said, strike it out. Stephen King restated the idea for modern readers in On Writing, and his phrasing, with kill in place of murder, is the one that stuck.
It helps to notice what Quiller-Couch was not saying. He was not telling writers to distrust everything they enjoy, or to sand a manuscript down to flat competence. He was warning against the special glow a writer feels around a show-off passage, because that glow blinds you to whether the passage earns its place.
What a darling looks like on the page
Darlings come in recognisable shapes. There is the gorgeous description that stops the story cold for two hundred words. The witty exchange that exists because you loved writing banter, not because either character needed to say it. The minor character with a backstory the plot never touches. The opening scene you wrote first and cannot bear to lose, even though the story now clearly starts on page three.
The most famous editorial demonstration is Gordon Lish's work on Raymond Carver's collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, where Lish cut some stories by half. Writers still argue about whether Lish went too far, and that argument is instructive: cutting darlings made the stories leaner and stranger, and it also removed things Carver grieved for. The technique is powerful and it has a cost, which is why the decision should finally be yours.
How to cut without bleeding
Never delete a darling; relocate it. Keep a cuts file for every project and paste the excised material there. Knowing the passage still exists somewhere lowers your resistance to removing it, and once in a while a cut scene genuinely seeds a new story. Then let the manuscript cool for a week or two before the cull, because darlings are much easier to spot when the memory of writing them has faded.
A reliable test: summarise what a scene does for the story in one sentence. If the honest summary is "it is beautifully written", that is a darling. If a passage survives the test but still feels indulgent, try reading the section aloud with the passage removed. When the story reads cleaner without it, you have your answer. The trap to avoid is overcorrection, cutting voice and texture until nothing remains but plot summary. Judges reading for Language and Craft, one of the five marks in Writory's monthly Short Story Contest, reward prose with personality, not prose stripped to the bone.
Neighbours and opposites
Kill your darlings is a revision principle, not a drafting one, which distinguishes it from the permissive spirit of the first draft, where you are encouraged to overwrite freely. It differs from general line editing because it targets your favourites specifically, the material your judgement is least trustworthy about. And it is not the same as trunking a story: a darling is a piece cut from a work that survives, while a trunk story is a whole work set aside.
A good critique partner is the natural ally here. Outside readers feel no loyalty to your darlings and will name them with unsettling speed.
What poets can take from this
- Keep a cuts file for every manuscript so deletion feels like storage, not loss.
- Let a draft sit for at least a week before hunting darlings; distance exposes them.
- Ask of every scene what it does for the story, not how well it is written.
- If two readers independently skim the same passage, it is probably a darling.
- Cut the darling, reread the whole section aloud, and only then decide.
Try it yourself
Take a finished story of yours and identify the single passage you are proudest of. Remove it entirely, repair the join, and reread. Write a paragraph honestly recording what the story lost and what it gained, then decide whether the darling returns.
Questions
Who first said kill your darlings?
The earliest traceable version is Arthur Quiller-Couch, who wrote "murder your darlings" in his 1914 Cambridge lectures on writing. The line is often misattributed to William Faulkner and others, and Stephen King popularised the modern kill phrasing in On Writing.
Does kill your darlings mean cutting everything I like?
No. It targets passages you love for reasons the story does not share, usually showy writing or pet scenes. Material you love that also moves the story, reveals character or builds meaning should absolutely stay.
What if a cut darling was the best writing in the piece?
Save it in a cuts file. Strong orphaned passages often become the seed of a new story, where they can be central rather than decorative. Many writers mine old cuts files for years.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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