The Shocking Truth Behind Your Favorite Creations: Why Letting Go Could Save Your Work

Oh So Clear

“Kill your darlings.”

If you’ve spent more than five minutes in writing circles, you’ve heard this advice. It’s repeated with the solemnity of ancient wisdom, passed down from one writer to another like a sacred commandment. It’s the literary equivalent of being told to “just be yourself” on a first date — ostensibly sound advice that’s about as helpful as a parachute that opens on impact.

So let’s dig into “kill your darlings” and analyze why this advice, though canonized, rests on a foundation of pure counterproductive nonsense.

What’s a darling, anyway?

Some people throw around “darling” like confetti. You know the type — the diner waitress who calls everyone darling, from the businessman ordering black coffee to the iPad kid having a nuclear meltdown because the chicken nuggets aren’t shaped like dinosaurs. If that’s your definition of darling, then sure, the advice makes perfect sense. Go ahead, kill your darlings. Be the waitress who goes full Rambo with a coffee pot, bludgeoning any paragraph that demands constant attention but offers nothing in return.

But if you’re like me, “darling” means something entirely different. It’s not a word you toss around casually. It’s something you reserve for pieces of writing you’ve showered with affection, preference, and attention — the passages you poured your soul into, invested in, and genuinely loved.

I used to have darlings like that — writing I treated as if I had physically birthed it myself, complete with all the blood, agony, and screaming that entails. And you know what? Sometimes, after endless hesitation and internal debate, I did what I was supposed to do: I murdered them.

I’ve slaughtered witty opening paragraphs, executed perfectly crafted conclusions, and massacred entire article series that I’d been building for months. And on one occasion, I even tore half the chapters out of a 400-page manuscript I had been working on for six years.

And it felt like slowly peeling my own skin off.