What Does "Kill Your Darlings" Mean?
Quick answer: What does kill your darlings mean? Cut the passages you love most when they serve you instead of the story. The phrase's origin and how to apply it honestly.
Kill your darlings means: be willing to cut the parts of your writing you love most when they serve your vanity rather than the story. A darling is any passage kept because it is clever, beautiful or hard-won, not because the story needs it: the dazzling metaphor, the witty exchange, the researched digression, the character who exists because you enjoy writing them. The advice does not say delete everything good. It says the story outranks your affection.
The phrase earns its fame because darlings are invisible to their owners. Every writer can cut the obviously weak line; the dangerous passages are the strong ones in the wrong places, defended by pride. Learning to spot and remove them is much of what separates revision from tinkering.
Where the phrase comes from
The original is Arthur Quiller-Couch, the Cambridge professor whose 1914 lectures were published as On the Art of Writing. His version was 'murder your darlings', and the advice around it is often misremembered: he was warning against fine writing for its own sake, urging that whenever you feel the impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, you should obey the impulse wholeheartedly, and then delete the result before your manuscript goes out.
The line has since been reattributed to half of literary history, most often William Faulkner, and Stephen King gave it new circulation in On Writing with his own expanded version about killing darlings even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart. The pedigree matters less than the consensus: a century of working writers, across genres, repeating the same warning about their own favourite sentences.
How to recognise a darling
Darlings have tells, and you can learn to feel them:
How to do the killing humanely
The practical trick that makes the advice usable is the graveyard file. Nothing is deleted; it is relocated. Keep one document per project, cut the darling in full, paste it there, and the operation stops feeling like amputation. Almost nothing is ever retrieved from the graveyard, which is itself the lesson, but the option's existence makes you brave at the moment bravery is needed.
Method matters too. Apply the test at the level of function, not beauty: for each suspicious passage ask what the story loses if it goes. Answer honestly in one sentence; if the answer is 'nothing, but', cut. Reading your work aloud exposes darlings efficiently, because your voice preens on them. So does a word limit; writers trimming a story to a contest cap, say the 2,000-word ceiling at Writory's monthly contest, regularly discover the last 200 words to go are all darlings, and that the story stands straighter without them.
What the advice does not mean
The phrase gets misused as a mandate for joyless prose, as if anything pleasurable must be suspect. Wrong way round: voice, wit and beauty are why readers stay. A gorgeous passage that also advances the story is not a darling, it is the job done well. The test is always function. Kill what serves only you; keep what serves the reader, however ornate.
It is also not an instruction to obey every cut a critique group suggests, since committees flag distinctive writing as often as indulgent writing. Nor does it apply mid-draft; killing darlings is revision work, and drafting with the knife already out produces timid pages. Draft with love, revise with the graveyard file open, and remember Quiller-Couch's actual sequence: write the indulgent thing wholeheartedly first. You cannot cut a darling you never allowed yourself to write.
What poets can take from this
- Keep a graveyard file per project so cutting feels like moving, not killing.
- Test passages by function: what does the reader lose if this goes? 'Nothing, but' means cut.
- Read aloud; your voice preens on darlings and gives them away.
- Suspect any passage you have relocated twice; homeless paragraphs are usually darlings.
- Draft with full indulgence, then revise with the knife; never both at once.
- Keep the beautiful line that also does story work; beauty is not the crime, idleness is.
Try it yourself
Open a finished draft and find the passage you would defend loudest. Cut it into a graveyard file, read the story without it twice, then decide in writing whether it returns. Whatever you decide, write one sentence about what the passage was really doing there.
Questions
Who said kill your darlings first?
Arthur Quiller-Couch, in Cambridge lectures published in 1914 as On the Art of Writing, where the phrasing was 'murder your darlings'. It is frequently misattributed to Faulkner and others, and Stephen King's On Writing gave it a famous modern restatement.
Does kill your darlings mean deleting good writing?
No. It means deleting writing whose only job is to be admired: passages that serve the author's pride rather than the reader's experience. Good writing that also moves the story stays, no matter how much you love it.
What should I do with the passages I cut?
Save them in a single outtakes file per project. You will almost never reuse them, but knowing they are recoverable makes the cut painless, and occasionally a buried image turns out to be the seed of an entirely new story.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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