why i keep killing my darlings

there’s a google doc on my laptop called “the morgue”. it’s where all my favourite sentences go to die. i visit it like a cemetery – tenderly, a little dramatically, sometimes to resurrect a phrase for a better life elsewhere. people think “kill your darlings” is macho advice, the writer as executioner. i think it’s the opposite. it’s the softest thing i do for my work, and for the person who will read it.

the darling is the sentence you love because it makes you feel clever, not because it tells the truth. it’s the metaphor that glittered in your brain for days but doesn’t actually belong to the argument you’re making. it’s the paragraph you wrote at 2 a.m. in a fever of aesthetic satisfaction that now sits in the middle of your essay like a peacock in a soup kitchen. beautiful, yes. helpful, no.

cutting it hurts because it feels like removing yourself from the work. you poured time, attention, and ego into that line. you want it to earn its keep. you contort the structure to accommodate it, and in doing so you betray the piece. the reader doesn’t know any of this, of course. they just feel a wobble, a confusion, a sense that the writer is showing off instead of showing up. and readers are generous, but only to a point. if you waste their attention, they take it back.

killing darlings is also about refusing to use ornament as a shield. sometimes i dress up a thought i’m not ready to commit to in gorgeous language, as if the prose can distract from the cowardice. sometimes i build a labyrinth of clauses so i don’t have to say the hard thing simply. cutting forces me to face the sentence naked: do i actually mean this? do i need to? can i say it cleaner, kinder, truer? editing becomes a moral practice – not puritan simplicity, but ethical clarity.

practically, i draft indulgently and edit brutally. the first draft is where the darlings are born and celebrated. i let them live. i enjoy them. i pat their little heads. the second draft is where i ask the piece what it wants. not what i wanted when i started, but what the piece, in its emerging shape, needs me to do. often it needs me to let go. so i copy the darling to the morgue, whisper a little eulogy, and hit delete. the text breathes. the reader moves forward. the argument stands straighter, less decorated, more itself.

there’s a political analogue here, too. movements fall in love with their own rhetoric – the perfect chant, the iconic slogan, the line that played well on social media – and then keep repeating it even when the context has shifted. organisations cling to tactics that once worked, because they remember the rush of the win, and in doing so they ignore the changed terrain. killing darlings in politics means retiring strategies that no longer serve the goal, not because they were bad, but because they were of their moment. nostalgia is not a plan.

what killing darlings is not: it’s not austerity. pleasure in language matters. voice matters. sometimes the darling stays because it’s both beautiful and right – those are the keepers, the lines that carry their weight and then some. the goal isn’t flat prose. it’s prose that earns every flourish. the difference is intent: am i doing this for me, or for us – me and the reader, me and the argument, me and the truth i’m trying to midwife onto the page?

i think of it like pruning. you don’t hack for the thrill of it; you cut so the plant can grow. you cut so the light can reach what needs it. you cut because excess can strangle. you cut with care, with knowledge of what must remain. and you compost the offcuts – they become soil for the next thing. nothing is wasted, only transformed.

so yes, i keep killing my darlings. i keep mourning them, and sometimes resurrecting them somewhere better. i keep trusting that the piece deserves my ruthlessness, which is just another word for devotion. i’m not writing to display my cleverness. i’m writing to be understood. and that means sometimes the most loving thing i can do is take my favourite sentence by the hand, walk it gently to the morgue, and thank it for its service.