Kill Your Bastards

Faulkner once said, “in writing, you must kill your darlings.” He was referring generally to those sections of writing that you’re really in love with, but it’s also been applied to kill off your favorite characters. In this case, I’m using it to refer to characters who you created but then sort of forgot about, your bastards. Hence, I’m changing Faulker’s quote from “kill your darlings” to “kill your bastards.”

If you look at the image, you’ll see a very small (very incomplete) list of charac...