Murdering Our Darlings: Why We Must Cut Down Our Prose

The old adage that we must murder our darlings in order to become real writers rings true. Hemingway would cut down anything that sounded to flowery to be in his novels or short stories. Stephen King wrote in "On Writing" that every story should be cut down ten percent in each draft. This means all those sentences we loved playing with must be cut down in order for the work to achieve success. In the pursuit of not cutting our darlings too much or too little, this essay will explore the keys to editing, why we must edit, and how to make a edited work find a publication or publisher.

The writers brought up were mainly fiction writers-or that is how their fame came. But one of the Stephen King's first jobs was as a newspaper writer. Hemingway went to the newspapers for work instead of going to college. Even Mark Twain started out with newspapers in his writing career. This points to an importance in the written word, and how it should be cut. The basic newspaper story, good or bad, is boiled down to a human story with a few details added for affect. The basic short story should not wander away from this. We do not want to be boring, but neither do we want to be to detailed and make our words too flowery. Here is an example of flowery prose in a newspaper article: "The massive basketball rims stood like tempests as the players approached the court." A newspaper will never publish it. We may not get yelled out, but everything but the rim, the players, and the court will be cut out. Newspapers were a learning experience for all the writers mentioned. Stephen King wrote in "On Writing" of how he learned to boil everything down to the basics by learning from one newspaper editor. He even said to "murder your darlings" in that popular book.

In article writing, we would never write something like that example. In a novel, we could toy with it, but we should listen to Hemingway. Hemingway had something called the iceberg theory: just about anything can be cut from the story if we try to. We can make a 1,000 word article a 400 one if we so choose. But, we should make it easy on ourselves. Find a theme, do not explore voice too much with our writing, and stick to the people involved.

We must do all this editing if we are to find ourselves a career in writing. We can learn the trials on our own, or we can learn from the masters like Hemingway and Twain. A work that is boiled down to the basics may not always find a publisher or publication, but the chances are much higher. So, murder your darlings, but do it with a knife instead of a sword, because much of what we write is already boiled down to people, places, and things.