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Writers, This Is What The Expression “Kill Your Darlings” Means
One of my college professors said this phrase to me.
“You have to be willing to kill your darlings.”
I didn’t know what that meant until I had written 874 pages of the first draft of my first book.
I spent literally my entire summer studying abroad working on that manuscript.
I was staying in a hostel in Prague for the first 6 weeks, then spent 4 weeks after that in Italy studying creative writing, and all I did was read and write, read and write. Both hostels didn’t have air conditioning, and I didn’t have Internet, so my daily routine was to sit in my boxers, no pants, no shirt, and write about my ridiculous adolescence as a teenager obsessed with World of Warcraft.
Of course, just because I wrote 874 pages didn’t mean it was any good.
In fact, when I showed my teacher senior year what I’d written, he quite literally told me I needed to start over.
I’d thought myself to be rather avant-garde by writing my first draft in the 3rd person — despite the fact that it was a memoir, and my story.