"Kill Your Darlings": Cutting What You Love (When You Must)

When rewriting, there is always that moment when a scene, a line, an idea feels like exactly what we were looking for - it works, it moves us, it crackles with tension. And most of the time, it genuinely does. But that isn't the question, because the right question to ask is: does it belong to the story? If it doesn't, kill it.

That is what Stephen King's famous phrase "Kill your darlings" (in: On Writing) actually means, a phrase not always well understood.

We don't write to accumulate beautiful scenes. We write to tell a story. And everything that doesn't serve that story, however accomplished, ends up weighing it down, blurring what we are really trying to say. So we have to know how to let it go, however painful that may be.

Because we must always return to first principles: What are we telling? How are we telling it?

Which doesn't mean rewriting coldly, without passion. But we must, as much as possible, avoid falling in love with what we make, with what we write. Stay a little distant, try to stand alongside the viewer or reader, and look at our work with enough lucidity to spot - and be able to cut - what doesn't serve the whole. Even if we wait until the final rewrite to do it. Even if it hurts. (It always hurts a little.) We can set it aside, hoping that the story this passage truly belongs to will one day come knocking at our door.

One must know how to cut what does not belong to the story, however accomplished it may be.

"Kill your darlings", because we don't rewrite for ourselves, but to tell a story to a viewer or a reader.

Déborah Braun / 90pages

Script doctor

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