What “Kill Your Darlings” Really Means

And What To Do Instead

Kill your darlings.

William Faulkner (or Ernest Hemingway, or George Orwell, or Oscar Wilde)

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

Stephen King

Like many familiar quotations, “Kill your darlings” has long ago lost its meaning, and along with it, its potency as real writing advice. It’s also both wildly misattributed and mildly misquoted. Still, it continues to be passed along as gospel to aspiring writers. Most likely, all the writers who are supposed to have said it really did say it at least once, and they must have meant something by it.

But as a creative writing teacher, I’m not just issuing quick, pithy advice; I’m devoted to the actual growth of my students as they write and revise. At the same time, “kill your darlings” is out there, so I do introduce the idea — with some major caveats. The question then becomes…

What does “kill your darlings” really mean?

It might help to look at the original context, which is in a lecture on writing by someone who is much less famous than all the writers who didn’t really say it first. Here’s the full quotation: