Kill Your Darlings
As writers, we all have perceived strengths we fall back on time and time again. But can over-reliance on your strengths actually weaken your manuscript?
As a freelance editors, we help our clients become well-rounded writers with strengths in different areas, not just in one darling place. From outline to querying and beyond, our editors at Good Story Editing will help you level up your manuscript.
Transcript for Kill Your Darlings Video
Hello. This is Mary Kole from Good Story Company.
I am back with some Youtube videos today, and this video is all about the well-known writing phrase "Kill your darlings." So, I'm excited to talk about this one because this is what I do in my daily job as a freelance editor. I help writers identify their darlings, their writing tics, the things that they tend to lean into, their strengths, and kill them. Okay. It's not how it sounds but I do want to introduce the idea that there is wisdom to this phrase "Kill your darlings," "Kill your babies." You've heard it, probably many different ways. The wisdom is that whenever you lean into your strength as a writer, you potentially neglect areas where you could be doing more development, more learning, doing a little bit more scratching as a writer. And if you only lean into your strengths, your manuscripts and your resulting talents, not just from manuscript to manuscript but the holistic career writer-wise, could end up with some underdeveloped areas and some very well-developed areas. If you only play to those well-developed areas, you could have some blind spots in your writing.
Now, an example I give all the time would be somebody who has really strong imagery. They know how to craft an image. Their images are evocative. Their images pull a lot of weight, and so that's what they do. Every scene is beautifully rendered, very detailed, very emotional but let's say that they don't have a strength in terms of action, or plotting, or dialogue. And so, what we end up with after a little while is a beautifully written book that doesn't move anywhere. We don't move forward in the plot. We don't have a sense of pacing, which is the perceived speed at which a project moves for the reader. We just have beautiful description and that's fine and good. At a certain point though, your readers are gonna want the story to progress. And if it doesn't, you may lose your reader with the most beautifully written project in the world, but you didn't kill that darling. And so, one of the weird things that I do as an editor is I help identify a writer's strengths but then, I tend to want to guide them away from leaning fully into that strength and toward developing other things.
Now, a darling could also be a funny dialogue. If you love funny dialogue but your book is just funny dialogue, it may, sort of, not really come together into a story. It may just be cute banter that gets a little grating after a while. That's a very common one. You may have a favorite word that you use, a favorite image that you use, a favorite description that you use, a favorite sentence structure that you use. I want to push you to know yourself a little bit better, notice patterns in your writing, whether image patterns, whether descriptive patterns, word patterns, sentence patterns, any kinds of patterns, and think, "Could I kill this darling or at least tone this darling down a little bit so that other areas of my writing can shine?" Because ideally, your goal is to be a fully well-rounded writer who has strength in different areas, not just in one darling place. So, food for thought.
This has been Mary Kole with Good Story Company. And here is to a good story and kill your darlings.
A set of professional eyes can help you identify and kill your darlings. Good Story Editing offers professional and affordable editing services for writers in all genres, at all stages of the writing process.
