Kill your darlings
Methods & processThe most famous revision precept: cut the passages you love too much, precisely because you love them too much.
Example
Three sumptuous pages of dawn over the lagoon — and the chapter truly starts on page 4. Cut the three pages.
"Kill your darlings": the precept orders cutting the passages you're proudest of when they don't serve the text — the virtuoso description freezing the action, the brilliant line ringing false in that mouth, the gorgeous scene that belongs to another book. Often attributed to William Faulkner and popularized by Stephen King, the phrase goes back to essayist Arthur Quiller-Couch ("murder your darlings," 1914).
The criterion isn't the passage's quality but its function: a darling is a fragment kept for self-love, not for the story's good. The practical test: if the cut leaves no hole — if nothing downstream calls for it — it was a darling. Trade trick: a "morgue" file for the cuts makes the execution less painful, and you almost never go back to it.
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