“Kill Your Darlings”: Tips and Tricks for Cuts in Revision

So, you’ve finished your story. First of all, congratulations! You’ve succeeded at a long, difficult task!

Here’s the bad news: you’re not actually done.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but what you’ve essentially done is apply the first coat of paint. Just like surfaces need several coats for the color to come out as strong as possible, your story needs multiple rounds of revision.

And you want to know the worst part of revision? It’s cutting things. Alright, trimming your text isn’t always the worst. Sometimes, it can be your opportunity to fix everything that you could tell was wrong with your first draft, but didn’t or couldn’t fix before now. Other times? Well… there’s a reason it’s called “killing your darlings”.

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What Does That Mean?

“Kill your darlings” is a bit of a misnomer. There’s no actual killing involved (or, at least, no more than was already in your story). To “kill your darlings” is to, as part of your revision, cut out the bits and pieces of your story that don’t serve any purpose other than to delight you.

There are several reasons to do this. First, we writers often have many darlings. We’re the writer, after all—of course we’re delighted by many aspects of our own stories. We’re probably writing these things because we delight in them. But too much of that personal delight, if not properly rooted in plot, character development, or pacing, both drags down and destabilizes the story.

Rick Riordan, author of the popular middle grade fiction series Percy Jackson and the Olympians, has talked about a particular darling that he had to kill in the last book of the original series, The Last Olympian. The first book in the series, The Lightning Thief, opens with a confrontation between Percy and one of his classmates, a girl named Nancy Bobofit. Nancy never reappears in the series, but Riordan has mentioned how he originally wanted her to come back in The Last Olympian as one of many mortals cursed to sleep while the titan Kronos attempted to overthrow the gods (The full deleted scene is still posted in various places online. If you’re interested, Google “The Last Olympian deleted scene”).

This scene is an excellent example of why killing your darlings can be so difficult. Nancy Bobofit’s reappearance would have called back to the earliest part of the series, before Percy even knew he was a demigod, and presented a comparison point for how much he has developed over the past four books. On the other hand, Nancy is, objectively, one of the least important characters in the series, and basically stops having an impact on Percy as soon as he learns about his heritage. The Last Olympian is full of scenes and characters that will haunt Percy for the rest of his life, and Nancy Bobofit simply isn’t one of them.

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How Do I Know Which Darlings to Kill?

Killing your darlings is, fortunately or unfortunately, pretty vibes-based. There’s no hard and fast rule on what level of detail is excessive, what kind of scene is superfluous, and what moment of character development is unnecessary. But as you’re going back through your story, you’ll automatically clock those moments that don’t need to be there.

That being said, you should always keep in mind the kind of story you’re trying to tell. If your story is wholly focused on platonic friendship, do you need to mention a romantic relationship? If your characters spend the whole story in a rural farming village, do they even care about every detail of the highly complex and intricate government you set up? And, if your five-book series has emphasized over and over how your protagonist has found his place in the world through new friends and understanding of his heritage, is a bully from his past really going to affect him?

There’s no two ways about it: killing your darlings is hard. But thoughtful use of this method will tighten up your story. I guarantee it.

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About the author: Evelyn is a Creative Writing major at Oberlin College. She just returned from a semester abroad at Trinity College Dublin, where she toured castle ruins, debated the merits and morals of cannibalism, and held a five-day-old lamb. Although a lifelong lover of all things fantasy, Evelyn is currently working on a futuristic science fiction story looking back on our modern day. Perhaps, one day, she might commit enough to outlining to write a murder mystery with wizards.