Kill Your Darlings and Never Think of Them Again
Tags: Revision, Writing, Improvement, Murder, Advertising

Why revision is the key to great writing

By: Kirsten Squires

About a year and a half after I’d started writing professionally, I attended my first writer’s conference. With my recently-finished shiny manuscript in hand, I dreamed with starry eyes that a literary agent would fall in love and want to publish it, cautiously (or maybe not cautiously?) optimistic that the long nights and hard work were going to pay off.

HA! Oh, naïve baby writer that I was. That did not happen, of course. The manuscript needed work, and I wasn’t ready. I had years of growing ahead of me.

Eventually, I did get an agent — but only after revisions, rewrites, and a new book. The writer I am today is a much different writer than the one who pitched the agents in those early years. Now, I understand that the power of writing is in revising and refining; that growth comes when I let go of my pride and challenge myself to do better. And this has helped my writing improve in all areas, whether I’m coming up with headlines for a client or dialogue for a fantasy novel.

Feedback Is Your Friend

No one likes to be criticized. Sometimes, that’s what it feels like when you get feedback. But feedback isn’t meant to hurt you, and it isn’t a commentary on you as a person. When you first start out in a creative field, this can be hard to remember. Your words or art that you slaved over, that exposes a piece of your soul? Hearing it’s flawed can feel like an attack.

But getting other perspectives on your writing helps you uncover new possibilities and makes your work even stronger. It makes you see things in a new light. Your colleagues and critique partners have all lived different lives than you. You can use this experience to broaden your own and connect with even more people.

The thing about feedback is that it’s not always right. As you become more experienced and confident in your craft, you’ll learn to recognize when people are on to something and when to trust your own instincts. But even if some feedback seems off-base, I always consider why it’s been said. They key is learning to filter and apply critiques to make your writing even better.

Rewrite and Reframe: Getting to the Good Stuff

At one of my first writing workshops, the novelist who was teaching it proclaimed we had to learn to “kill our darlings.” Our “darlings” were the words we had labored over, the sentences we had painstakingly crafted to give the reader chills. That pretty prose, she explained, had no place in our writing if it didn’t contribute to the story. I went home and slashed and burned through unnecessary words, sentences, and paragraphs. Over the course of the workshop, I learned to pull back and examine my writing as an outsider would.

In marketing, we have mere moments to catch the audience’s attention. We don’t have time to waste on words that don’t contribute to the message. As a copywriter, it’s my job to be judicious and get to the point.

Whether feedback comes from your creative director or your best writing buddy, it should lead to the same end: re-examining your work and deciding how it can be made stronger. I like to write in layers, first just getting my ideas down on the page and then refining as I go along — becoming my own critique partner, in a sense. I’ve come to realize that my best ideas usually aren’t my initial ones. It’s only after letting things sit, after hearing what others think, and after looking at something with fresh eyes that I get to the heart of what I want to say.

Like any other skill, writing is a craft that gets better with time and experience. I’m learning every day. Looking back at old work makes me smile because I see how I’ve improved since then. I can pinpoint what changes I would make.

I identify which darlings I would kill.