How to Kill Your Darlings (Even When It’s Really Hard)

Four successful nonfiction writers share how they grapple with the necessary, often-painful task of cutting from their work.

Collage by Yunuen Bonaparte/Narratively archive

Hi, there. Happy Juneteenth! We’re so happy to bring you our first StoryCraft piece on the new site. This is a subject close to our hearts, so we hope you enjoy and find some useful tips to take away. (We want to hear from you, too! Share in the comments at the end to tell us how you kill your darlings.)

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If writing is an act of creation, then editing can feel like an act of, well, destruction. It’s no wonder one of the most widely cited axioms of narrative writing employs such harsh imagery: “Kill your darlings.” The phrase has been recycled in writing workshops and guides for decades. It often gets attributed to big-name authors like William Faulkner or Stephen King, but the earliest iteration of the refrain comes from the lesser-known writer Arthur Quiller-Couch, who said in a 1914 lecture: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

The point: Don’t be too precious about your writing. When crafting a personal essay or a work of narrative nonfiction, it’s easy to become captivated by your own ability — to want to hang onto an especially poignant metaphor or a turn of phrase that just sings. But sometimes flourishes detract from the narrative, and cutting the fat can get you closer to the story you’re actually trying to tell. Still, once you’ve grown attached to a series of words or collection of paragraphs, leaving them behind can feel like nothing short of abandonment. So, how do we get rid of those cherished pieces? How do we decipher what can be deleted and what deserves to stay?

I asked four prolific — and award-winning — memoir and essay writers to share how they heed this pervasive writing proverb.

Prachi Gupta

Author of They Called Us Exceptional

Before I started writing my memoir, I did an exercise that my agent recommended. I wrote on index cards all the themes of my book and what I wanted to convey. Doing that exercise really clarified for me why I was writing this. It became my guide for “what do I keep in?” and “what do I keep out?” It helped me answer the question: Is this detail, turn of phrase or mini story serving the larger story?

When you write something that sounds good or witty, it appeals to your ego. But there’s a different feeling you get when you write something that’s really honest and true — and it doesn’t necessarily feel good. When you’re writing a memoir, you’re letting people see who you are. The ego wants to protect a certain image of itself, but your job as a memoir writer is to try to get underneath that. Ultimately, I had to scrap the stuff that was about ego. I had to dig further and think, What is actually true? In order to do this, I did a lot of body work. I did a lot of meditating. I ran a lot. I was doing things to try to come back into my body, so that after I had written, I could feel what I wrote and see what was actually sitting well with me — and then cut what wasn’t.

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Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Author of The Undocumented Americans and Catalina

I often end up having to cut my favorite parts because my reasons for liking them can be misguided — they call attention to themselves, they’re too clever. I think I might be harder on the parts of my writing I really love because I’m afraid of my own vanity. What I immediately delete: jargon, cliches, lines that sound like ChatGPT could have produced them from a prompt to write like me. I think, honestly, editing your own writing requires a high tolerance for self-cringe.

I have a running Word doc filled with lines from the cutting room floor of various attempts at essays, articles, captions. I periodically transfer the contents of random notebooks and my Notes app to that Word doc, which makes cutting them to begin with easier. It’s like a depot of spare car parts — some are better than others. But I do keep a lot of it around because you never know.

The older I get, the more comfortable I am writing sentences without tricks. It’s like being a good dancer. You can be the kind of dancer that does a lot of death drops and splits, or you can just know how to dance a salsa really well. Death drops and splits are more “look at me,” and dancing salsa is more “dance with me.” I am now more attached to how I want my reader to feel than what words get me there, meaning I’m doing more self-editing in the preliminary stages.

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Emily Rapp Black

Author of Poster Child, The Still Point of the Turning World, Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg and Sanctuary

I work in a big document when I write, and everything gets dumped in there. I like to open it, see a big mess, and start slowly cleaning it up. All of the “untended” work moves to the bottom of the page, and if I don’t use it, I store it in a “rejects” file. I don’t get emotional about cutting lines because I have, at times, gone back to the rejects file and used a line that I’d written 20 years before. I also read everything aloud, which is the best (if wildly unpleasant) editorial technique that I recommend to literally all of my students. What to cut becomes so obvious when you read aloud that it eases the pain of doing it.

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Greg Mania

Author of Born to Be Public

I used to be more precious about my words. I have an obsessive (or, some might say, excessive) personality. I’m a memoirist, screenwriter and now a novelist, but at my core, I’m a joke writer. I used to bend over backwards like a human tire to make a joke work in whatever I was writing. If an editor ever cut it, I’d find a way to bring that joke back, draft after draft, like a weed that just kept popping up.

Over time, though, I’ve become less precious about the output itself and more invested in the generative work it takes to get there — the part where I’m experimenting, surprising myself and doing the work that leads somewhere new. I put the work first and have to serve it, so if that means cutting something, then I do it. Depending on what it is, I might move it into a “dead darlings” folder. More often than not, I’ll recycle or repurpose it for something else, especially if it’s a joke.

If anything, I think it’s fun to look back on past unpublished work as a sort of time capsule, just to revisit it. Some may cringe at things they’ve written in the past, but I think it’s good to cringe. It means you’ve grown and evolved as a writer! But also, you might go back to it for a boost of confidence, like, “I did that, bitch.” Just because something didn’t work well in one context doesn’t mean it might not have a place somewhere else. This is why I started a reading series in Los Angeles called Empty Trash with fellow author Jen Winston. We don’t just give a home to cut, killed or otherwise unpublished work — we celebrate it.

How do you kill your darlings? Let us know in the comments below!

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Marisa Charpentier is a writer, editor and fact-checker in Brooklyn, New York. She has been published in The New York Times, NPR, The Art Newspaper, Texas Highways and more.

These interviews have been minimally edited and condensed for clarity.

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