Kill your darlings. Kill them dead.

We all hold onto things. I do.  

At least three times a day, I cry out a groan as something I did ten years ago pops into my brain like the boogie man and replays every detail of something I did that I wasn’t even thinking about. I was thinking - hey, that new Rivian pickup is so cool, but I wouldn’t have gotten that color, and then I’m suddenly seeing in vivid, crystal-clear clarity, the time that girl I had a crush on, poked me in the stomach and I farted.  

I see no evolutionary benefit to something like that being stored in there, much less there being a reason that some part of your mind slaps you in the face, or in my case, pokes me in the gut, with something so damaging. Nor do I see a biblical element where God thought it would be a good idea to torment humans with past embarrassments on a daily basis. Evolutionary or Supernatural, take your pick, it’s kinda bullshit for that to exist.  

It’s an odd segue into a blog about killing your darlings.

Maybe even some of you don’t know what that means.  

On a very basic level, picture the three best pages of writing you’ve ever written. These pages are filled with incredible prose, unbelievable imagery, conflict so pure in its execution that you sweat when you read it again, brilliant character development, and dialog so concise that you think Shakespeare himself possessed your fingers and scribbled out words you didn’t even know you contained in your limited being.  

Then you read through your manuscript a month later and realize, oh shit, it is brilliant. Then, oh fuck, it doesn’t work for the story. And damn it all to hell, it doesn’t belong there at all. Okay… I can salvage it. I can just work some other parts to fit it. I can’t just erase that genius. I may never have that genius again. There’s got to be a way around it. Maybe you try for a while. Maybe you send it to some friends and hope they come back with beaming notes of praise about those three pages and how they were the best words they ever laid eyes on.  

But they don’t. They don’t because you don’t even send it. You don’t send it because you know. Deep down you know.  

With trembling hands, you highlight those three pages, and with a similar crying groan that you make when you think of Deanne Honeycutt poking you a hello to the tummy and you fart, you press delete.  

That’s killing your darlings.  

It gets easier.

I’ve killed fifteen thousand words of darlings in a single manuscript. Weeks of writing erased into the ether with the click of a button. In the immortal words of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now… The horror.  

When you finally have the courage to open that manuscript again, and the shame of word-homicide abates, you will find a much better story. It’s faster. Cleaner. More to the point. It flows. You did exactly what that story needed you do to. You killed your darlings.  

Now I don’t just kill my darlings…  

I murder them.  

If only I could erase the image of Deanne Honeycutt’s face when I farted.  

I would stab that part of my brain with an icepick if there was even a tiny chance it would work