How to Kill Your Darlings Without Destroying Your Ego

It's all in how you frame it

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

As writers, we work painstakingly to craft beautiful sentences, paragraphs and stories. And then there comes a time when an editor says we need to cut 20,000 words or wants us to “tighten it up.” The horror of having to delete those beautiful pieces often seems like too much to bear.

“Noooo! Don’t make me cut my beautiful words!”

Yes, as a species, writers can be a bit dramatic about our words.

The phrase “killing your darlings” refers to the process of deleting exquisitely crafted, beautifully told lines and sections. They’re so beautiful! You want people to see you wrote such magic! (I am guilty of both this kind of preciousness, and also of being the editor that suggests cutting.)

Here’s the thing: If you wrote that beautifully once, you can and will write that beautifully again. If a sentence (or entire chapter) doesn’t serve the story, or if it slows the story down, it doesn’t belong in the document. Period.

How to K̶i̶l̶l̶ Relocate Your Darlings Gently

Over the years, I’ve developed two techniques to minimize the trauma of killing my darlings:

First, I always work from the same document, but every time I make a significant revision (usually once a day), I save a new version with the date (e.g., 14Mar05). If I make several changes over the course of a single day, I save each version, using suffixes of a, b, c etc. That way, I can always go back to an earlier version.

Second, when I begin editing in earnest—after I have a strong rough draft—I start an “Outtakes” file. This, I suspect, is also a leftover from my days in television, where entire scenes get left on the proverbial cutting-room floor (these days, they’re more likely to be stored on a hard drive).

Every time I cut a sentence, paragraph or section, I paste it into the Outtakes document. This gives my ego the illusion that I haven’t actually deleted the words; I’ve just…moved them. And they’re right there, should I decide the story can’t possibly work without that particular phrase. This is a way of honoring the work that went into creating the beautiful pieces, while also acknowledging the need to make the final piece – whether a report, a blog post, an essay, a manuscript – as tight as it can be. 

Nothing is Ever Wasted

Anything you cut from a memoir or nonfiction book can become fodder for essays or op-eds in national outlets. I tell my clients all the time “Nothing is ever wasted; it’s just repurposed.”

Twenty years ago, I wrote a memoir about a trip I took with my elderly father. I spent five years revising it, and the response was pretty good, but for a variety of reasons, I didn’t pursue publication.

Three years ago, I pulled one scene from that memoir for an essay.

You can always repurpose whatever you cut.

Lessons from Broadway and Television

I once worked with a Broadway playwright – Tom Meehan, who wrote Annie, The Producers and Hairspray – who did a similar thing (I think this is where I got the idea). Broadway musical scripts change daily, sometimes multiple times a day. Lines are added and cut at lightning pace. Tom kept a folder of lines and jokes that were cut from one script, then saved them in case he could use them in a later show. I saw this practice in action when I went to see The Producers and recognized half a dozen jokes lifted directly from Annie 2, the show I’d worked on with him more than a decade prior (and which closed during out-of-town previews, prior to ever opening on Broadway).

Mike Schur, creator and showrunner of The Good Place and author of the tongue-in-cheek How to be Perfect, uses the phrase “candy jar” for the same type of file—subplots, characters and jokes that had to be cut. When Schur and his Good Place writing team needed inspiration, he’d tell them to look in the candy jar.

Remember, There Will Always be More

Of course, in comedy, it’s much easier to cut and paste. In narrative writing, I wouldn’t suggest consciously holding onto a line or phrase. As Natalie Goldberg writes in Wild Mind, “Spend it all. Spend it now.” There will always be more.

Ostrich photo by Finja Petersen on Unsplash