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.