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Writers, This Is What The Expression “Kill Your Darlings” Means

Nicolas Cole
2 min readMar 8, 2020

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.

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Nicolas Cole
Nicolas Cole

Written by Nicolas Cole

100M+ Views | 5x Author | Co-founder of Ship 30 for 30 | Want to start writing online? Get the Ultimate Guide: https://startwritingonline.com

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