Kill Your Darlings
Quick answer: Kill your darlings is revision advice telling writers to cut favourite lines that do not serve the poem. Trace the phrase and learn how to apply it.
Kill your darlings is a piece of revision advice: when a line, image or phrase exists mainly to show off rather than to serve the poem, cut it, however much you love it. The 'darling' is not simply anything you like. It is the bit you like for the wrong reasons, the flourish that announces your cleverness while the poem stands around waiting for it to finish.
The advice earns its place in every workshop because self-love is the hardest editorial blind spot. Writers will happily tighten a weak line, but a gorgeous irrelevant one gets defended like family. Learning to recognise and remove darlings is less about ruthlessness than about loyalty: you are choosing the whole poem over your favourite part of it.
Where the Phrase Comes From
The source is Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose 1914 Cambridge lectures, published as On the Art of Writing, told students that if they felt an impulse toward 'extraneous ornament' they should obey it wholeheartedly in the draft, then delete it before publication: murder your darlings. The line has since been pinned on William Faulkner and popularised by Stephen King, but Quiller-Couch got there first, and his version is the sharpest, because he admits the darling is genuinely lovely. That is the whole problem.
How to Spot a Darling
Darlings have tells. They survive every draft unchanged while the poem transforms around them, which often means the poem is being written to protect them. They sound slightly like a different, showier poet. You find yourself defending them before anyone has attacked. And when a trusted reader hesitates over one, your first instinct is to explain rather than reconsider.
How to Cut Without Regret
Do not delete darlings; deport them. Keep a darlings file and move every cut treasure there, which lowers the emotional price of the cut to almost nothing. Then reread the poem without the line. Nine times out of ten the wound closes seamlessly and the surrounding lines stand taller. The tenth time, you have learned the line was structural after all, and it goes back with your full confidence. Either way you win, and the file becomes a seedbed for future poems.
What poets can take from this
- Keep a darlings file so cutting feels like relocation, not execution.
- Ask of every showpiece line: does the poem need this, or do I?
- Cut the suspected darling, read the poem cold the next day, and see if anything is actually missing.
- Beware any line you wrote before the poem existed; it may be the poem's landlord rather than its tenant.
- Invite one honest reader to name the line they would cut, and take the suggestion seriously for a full day before deciding.
Try it yourself
Open a poem you have revised at least twice and remove the single line you are proudest of. Rewrite the poem so it thrives without it, then start a brand-new poem whose first line is the exile.
Questions
Does kill your darlings mean deleting everything I like?
No. It targets the things you like for reasons outside the poem: display, sentiment, attachment to an old draft. Lines you love that also carry the poem's weight are not darlings; they are the poem.
Who first said kill your darlings?
Arthur Quiller-Couch, in his 1914 Cambridge lectures on writing, where the phrasing was 'murder your darlings'. It is frequently misattributed to William Faulkner, and Stephen King's On Writing carried it to a new generation.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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