Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38450
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The recommendation to remove something that's good in its own right, but doesn't belong in the broader context of a work, is usually phrased as "kill your darlings". While this is now [a literary journal's name](https://killyourdarlings.com.au/), it started when Arthur Quiller-Couch used a slightly different phrase in a 1916 lecture:

> Style, for example, is not – can never be – extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – wholeheartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.'

In that original context it's clear he was worried mainly about highfalutin vocabulary... you know, like _highfalutin_. Today, the concern is more with scenes. In either case, it's worth archiving your darlings so you can rework some of them later. One reason I use a program called LyX to write is that I can hide anything in a note, so it doesn't persist in the output but I never have to delete it. Chapters' worth have been preserved for future reference that way. But yes, if a scene isn't necessary, lose it. If the _information_ in the scene is necessary, find a way to work its introduction into something truly necessary, be it just when it's needed or sooner.

Original score: 1