Learning to kill my darlings

It's tough but everybody has to do it

A common piece of writing advice is that you will have to kill your darlings.

This essentially means that you need to learn how to edit and cut parts of your writing in instances when it isn’t working – even if you love it. This might be a fun side character or a particularly great metaphor that you’re really chuffed about, but if it doesn’t actually work in the story as a whole then it’s got to go.

But if it’s so clear that it isn’t working, surely cutting it will be easy? Well, writing is often such a personal pursuit – maybe your story is inspired by something that happened to you or it’s literally a memoir piece – that it can be hard to cut out the bits that you love the most.

Getting feedback

When you’re in the early stages of your writing journey, it can be really easy to dismiss the feedback you receive from other writers or editors. Oh, they don’t understand what I’m doing. I built this fantasy world, of course it has to work exactly like this. They don’t know my characters like I do.

Except that they do! It can be really hard to detach your story from the world you’ve created inside your head, but all your reader will have is the words on the page. It’s actually so exciting that each reader will arrive at it in a slightly different way.