Kill Your Darlings: What It Really Means (And How to Do It)

"Kill your darlings." It's one of the most repeated pieces of writing advice in existence, and also one of the most misunderstood.

The phrase traces back to the British author Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who wrote in On the Art of Writing:

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.

William Faulkner, Stephen King, and Oscar Wilde have all been credited with variations of this advice. But what does it actually mean to "kill your darlings?" In this post, we'll explore what makes something a "darling," why they're so difficult to cut, and how to recognize them in the story you're writing.

What does it mean to "kill your darlings"?

Stephen King wrote in his craft book, On Writing:

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

So what makes something a "darling" in writing? A darling is not simply a pretty sentence or a section of purple prose. It's anything in your manuscript that you are attached to beyond what the story actually warrants.

Yes, it can be a piece of prose so elegant you've been secretly building the chapter around it, arranging the surrounding paragraphs like furniture around a fireplace. But darlings come in many other forms too:

• A scene you spent weeks writing that showcases your research, your wit, or your emotional range, but that doesn't meaningfully advance the plot or deepen character.
• A subplot that fascinated you during drafting but that exists more for your own curiosity than for the reader's experience of the story.
• A character you love unconditionally, perhaps because they're loosely based on someone real, even though the story would be tighter without them.
• A theme or idea you want to explore, inserted into a story that is actually about something else.
• A structural choice you made early on, such as a framing device, a timeline, or a point of view that you've become so committed to that you can no longer see what works and what doesn't.

The telltale sign is attachment. A darling is anything where your love for it as a writer exceeds the story's need for it. And that love, however genuine, is exactly what makes darlings so dangerous. They feel essential. They feel like the heart of the thing when, often, they're blocking it.

Why are darlings so hard to cut?

If identifying and cutting darlings were easy, the phrase wouldn't have become a piece of legendary writing advice. The reason it resonates so deeply is that it asks fiction writers to do something that runs counter to every instinct.

The sunk cost fallacy

You spent three weeks on that chapter. You researched the historical setting for months. You rewrote that scene eleven times until it finally sang. Cutting it feels like throwing all of that away, or like admitting the work was wasted.

It wasn't. The writing you did to produce that scene taught you things about your story, your characters, and your own craft that inform everything around it. The scene itself may need to go, but the work was never wasted. What's wasted is keeping a scene in a manuscript where it doesn't belong because you can't bring yourself to acknowledge that the story has moved on.

Emotional attachment

Some darlings aren't about effort, but about meaning. The scene where your protagonist visits her grandmother's house is drawn from your own memory of your grandmother's house. The character who makes everyone laugh is modeled on your best friend. The themes you're exploring are the questions that have preoccupied you for years.

Personal investment isn't a flaw; it's often what gives writing its power. But when personal investment overrides narrative judgment, the story suffers. Readers don't know what the scene means to you. They only know whether it works on the page.

It never completely goes away

Here's the truth: even experienced writers feel the resistance of removing beloved but extraneous parts of the story. Cutting a darling never becomes painless. What changes with practice is not the feeling but the relationship to it; the ability to recognize it for what it is, to trust that the story will be better on the other side, and to do it anyway.

How to identify darlings in your writing

The tricky thing about darlings is that they're almost impossible to see clearly while you're in the middle of drafting. You need distance from the work and from your own attachment to it. Here are the most reliable ways to find them.

The cold read

Put your first draft away for as long as you can manage, and then read it again from the beginning without stopping to edit. The places where your attention drifts, where you find yourself skimming or checking how many pages are left, are the places that need work. Darlings almost always reveal themselves in a cold read.

Scenes that don't move the story forward

Every scene in a story or novel should do at least one of the following: advance the plot, deepen a character, raise the stakes, or shift the reader's understanding of the story. Ideally, it does two or three of these things at once.

If you have a scene you love that doesn't clearly accomplish any of these things, you have a darling. The fact that it's beautifully written, emotionally resonant, or personally meaningful doesn't change its function, or lack of one.

Characters the story doesn't need

Look at your supporting cast. Are there characters who exist primarily because you enjoy writing them? A witty side character who pops up for comic relief but has no real arc? A mentor figure whose wisdom you love exploring, but who could be cut without affecting the protagonist's journey?

Characters cost the reader attention and investment. Every character who takes up space on the page should be earning it.

What beta readers skip

Pay close attention to feedback from beta readers, especially the moments they describe as slow, confusing, or easy to skim. Their experience of the story is more reliable than your attachment to it. Many writers find it easier to cut something once a trusted reader has articulated why it isn't working.

How to actually "kill" them

Knowing a darling needs to go and being able to cut it are two different skills. Here are the techniques that make it possible.

The darlings file

Never delete a darling entirely— just move it! Create a separate document (call it "Cuts," "Darlings," or whatever helps you open it without dread) and paste everything you remove into it. This removes the irreversibility that makes the editing process feel difficult. The prose still exists. You can return to it.

Some writers find that their darlings file becomes a source of material for future projects. A scene that didn't belong in this novel might be the seed of the next one, a character who doesn't fit might be the hero of a spinoff story, or cut subplots may even become the plot of a short story set in your novel's world!

Reframe the cut

Instead of thinking "I am removing this," try thinking "I am freeing this story from something that's holding it back." It sounds like a small shift, but it changes the emotional valence of the act. You're not destroying something; you're making a choice that prioritizes the reader's experience over your own attachment.

When you're unsure whether something needs to go, ask not "do I love this?" but "does this serve the story?" These are different questions with different answers. Love is about you. Service is about the reader. A scene can be beautifully written and still be wrong for the book. That's the whole point.

Ready to make your story stronger?

At its deepest level, "kill your darlings" isn't a sentence-level editing instruction. It's a philosophy of craft.

It asks writers to make a fundamental commitment: that the story comes first. Not your ego, not your effort, not your emotional investment, not your desire to be seen as clever or lyrical or profound. The story, and the reader's experience of it. That commitment, made honestly and held consistently, is one of the best ways to grow as a writer!