Kill Your Darlings Jun 2026

Attention Writers! Please Refrain From Using the Phrase “Kill Your Darlings”

You will feel a strange lightness. That is the feeling of a story unburdened.

Are you keeping it just because you like it? (This is the purest form of darling.) Kill Your Darlings

He did not mean to kill characters, plots, or genres. He meant to kill sentences , scenes , metaphors , and passages that you love—not because they are good, but because you love them too much . The darling is a piece of writing that serves your ego, not your story. It is the three-page description of a sunset that halts the plot. It is the witty, alliterative paragraph that made your writing group chuckle but has nothing to do with the protagonist’s arc. It is the character you adore but who serves no narrative function.

Few things scream “darling” louder than a dream sequence. Dreams allow writers to be surreal, symbolic, and unburdened by logic. They are also, 90% of the time, irrelevant to the plot. If your dream sequence exists to show off your imaginative imagery rather than to reveal necessary information, kill it. Attention Writers

Print the manuscript and don’t look at it for two weeks. Then read it as a reader. Without the heat of recent composition, darlings stand out like sore thumbs.

In the pantheon of writing advice, few phrases carry as much weight—or provoke as much anxiety—as the infamous command: Kill your darlings. Attributed (likely apocryphally) to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and popularized by Stephen King in his memoir On Writing , this phrase has become a sacred mantra in workshops, MFA programs, and writers’ retreats. But like many profound truths, it is also widely misunderstood. Are you keeping it just because you like it

To do this effectively, we need to develop a critical eye. We need to be able to look at our work and say, "This is great," or "This needs to go." We need to be honest with ourselves about what's serving the story and what's not. And we need to be willing to make tough cuts, even if it means sacrificing our darlings.