This piece of writing advice lives everywhere. But kill your darlings doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means. Particularly if you don’t have “darlings” to kill off. It still applies in other ways and has a much broader meaning writers should understand.

Where does the idea of kill your darlings come from?

You probably have heard this piece of writing advice in regards to killing a character if the story needs it. No matter how much you love them. The character is your “darling” and you are killing them. The point here is not to be too attached to what you’ve written that it ruins the overall story.

But I think it has more depth than just that. And you don’t have to kill your darlings after all.

What does kill your darlings mean in writing?

It means to loosen your control on the story. Write the story that needs to be written, not necessarily the one you thought from the start.

Yes, you’ll see a lot of people talk about editing and cutting. Opt for clarity over purple prose. That sort of thing. But it goes deeper than that when you’re first developing the story. Before you even have something to edit and cut.

So many of us start a book with an idea—or several—and we love it. The love for it is what prompts us to actually start writing it. But then we make progress, only to find that the ideas don’t always work together. Nor do the characters we first come up with.

The story starts developing and we can’t seem to make it work. So we force it.

We smash together plot points with little continuinty.

We make characters do things they’d never do with how we’ve developed them thus far. Just so they can arrive at those plot points.

Because that’s how we first envisioned it. And because we fell in love with this idea, we’re very attached to that vision.

The real cause & cure for “killing your darlings”

In order to release the control you have on a story, you need one very specific thing. Because the problem isn’t that we love the story. It’s not that we’ve become attached.

It’s that we’re not confident enough in our abilities as writers to deviate from our original vision to craft a new one that works for the story.

But didn’t we do that from the very beginning? Didn’t our imaginations come up with all those ideas in the first place?

If you know story, and you learn what makes for a good story, you can throw any idea away and make any other idea work. Your character doesn’t need to maintain a certain tone just because that’s how you always pictured before.

Not if it doesn’t work for the story.

Feel into your work. Ask if what you’ve just come up with and wrote fits the story. You have what it takes to come up with something that works. Something better.

And when you release that control and remove that attachment, something better always comes up. Maybe not right away. Maybe not tomorrow. But maybe in the shower a few days from now.

Slow down and let your creative mind have the breathing room it needs to do the background work and imagine what can work for the story next. Have confidence in your imagination and you won’t have to kill your darlings. You won’t have any.

The finished, complete book when all editing is said and done, can be your darling.

Authors who killed their darlings and made our favorite books

So what does kill your darlings really mean? To me, it means to never have darlings in the first place. Then you won’t have to be a murderer at all.