Murder Your Darlings!

WHA-A-AT?

There's a tale that the French short story writer Guy de Maupassant, as a young writer starting out, was mentored by the poet Alfred de Musset who was older and more established. They used to go for walks in the park and de Musset would teach the younger writer the skills he had acquired in his own writing life. 'Murder your darlings' was perhaps his most famous piece of advice.

Well that's the story I heard from my English teacher when I was 16. It appears to be rather fictional itself! It seems, for instance, that de Maupassant's mentor was actually the novelist Gustave Flaubert – which is much more likely, as he was only seven when Alfred de Musset died. As for the famous advice, Wikipedia says it is 'commonly misattributed' and was actually written by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. The evidence supports this. But in any case, what on earth does it mean?

This. If there's something in a piece of writing you've just done that you are inordinately proud of, something that really strikes you as a fine bit of writing, something that you're so attached to that you might throw the rest away so long as you get to keep THAT word or THAT line ... or paragraph, or chapter ... that's probably the very thing you should discard.

Why? Because it's probably self-indulgent, and is liable to stick out in a way so jarring that it works against delivering your message.

Let's change the context for a minute and think of watching a movie. What we want is to believe in what we're seeing, if only for that little while when we're actually seeing it. 'The willing suspension of disbelief,' it's been called. If we find ourselves admiring a particularly fine piece of acting, we have lost the illusion; we have stopped believing in the character. It's only afterwards, leaving the cinema, that we should notice, 'Oh, what a terrific piece of acting; I forgot I was watching a movie.' It is the same for a fine piece of writing that we notice. If it's noticeable, for that moment we've lost the thread of what we're reading. It's more effective if the reader gets lost in the words and only afterwards realises what wonderful words they were and how beautifully they were put together.

There are some good articles on the subject online, e.g. at
Easy Way to Write, MindTWEAKS, Poynteronline and, wait for it, Murder Your Darlings. I cite them all, because they're full of good stuff on that and related matters.

All this does NOT mean you should become completely lacking in discernment about your writing. How can you edit and revise if you can't tell good from bad? That's rather the point, in fact. It's a matter of telling what's good or bad in context. The detailed factual presentation needed in a piece of technical writing could be a complete turn-off in a novel. The slangy, conversational tone suitable for a personal blog might be highly inappropriate for a Ph.D. thesis. And so on. Of course don't edit as you write; let it all pour out at white heat if possible and refine it later – but when you do edit, you will need to be dispassionate, even ruthless, about what's working and what isn't.

How to tell if something is a 'darling' to be murdered? That's easy. Are you attached to it? Do you feel a wrench at the thought it might have to go? Would you want to retain it even if that risked weakening the piece as a whole? That's the one!

- Rosemary (Facilitator)