That writing mentor told me to kill my favorite paragraph and I'm glad I did

I had this writing teacher in a workshop last year, an older guy named Tom who wrote for magazines. He read my short story and said "that paragraph where the character describes the sunset, cut it, it's slowing everything down." I was so mad at first because I thought that paragraph was beautiful. But I tried it, took it out, and the story moved way faster and got picked up by a small lit journal 3 months later. Has anyone else had a piece of advice that hurt to hear but turned out to be right?

3 comments

3 Comments

abby_morgan1816d ago

I read this article once that said killing your darlings makes you a stronger writer.

blair_chen8116d ago

Killing your darlings makes you a stronger writer" - okay but depends on what you mean by darlings. Most people think of that as cutting out a scene or a character you love but doesn't serve the story. The angle nobody talks about is the darlings that are your bad habits. Like your crutch words, your overused sentence structures, the same emotional beats you hit every time. Those are harder to kill because they feel like part of your voice. I had to murder my obsession with dramatic weather descriptions because every draft had a storm brewing for no reason. Cutting that stuff out hurt more than losing any scene, but it made my writing actually better.

simon_carr16d ago

Blair's got a point about those bad habit darlings. My crutch word was "suddenly" - had it in every other sentence for years. Had to go through an entire novel draft with a delete key and a lot of self-loathing. Makes you wonder if the internet counts as a darling worth killing too, given how much time we waste here.