Kill Your Darlings: The Art of Revision — 9. Kill Your Darlings

Ninth element in this series: Kill Your Darlings: The Art of Revision
(Please read the Introduction, if you haven’t already.)

KILL YOUR DARLINGS

“Kill your darlings” does not mean you have to kill off your favorite characters (although it may). This refers to the fact that writers fall in love with what they have written and cannot bear the thought of deleting it, even if those passages are not needed to tell the story.

Ask yourself, what’s the story reason for including this in the book?  D...