to kill your darlings
- idiom
- Literature
:
sacrificar tus querencias
- To make her story stronger, she decided to kill your darlings and remove the lines she loved the most.
Examples
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Writers talk of "killing your darlings"—the ruthless side of writing, where we need to excise whole sentences or paragraphs or even pages but find it excruciatingly hard to do because we're in love with them.
Blog text (7) -
He had to kill your darlings when revising his novel, even though he was attached to some favorite passages.
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Learning to kill your darlings is crucial for writers who want to enhance their prose and focus on clarity.
Synonyms
How Willing
Surface Forms
Morphology
The literal components ('kill' = remove/destroy, 'your' = possessive, 'darlings' = beloved things) allow a learner to infer a metaphorical sense of discarding things one is attached to, but the conventionalized, domain-specific meaning referring specifically to deleting favored parts of one’s writing is not fully predictable without exposure. Because the connection is partly inferable yet requires cultural/genre knowledge to reach the precise editorial sense, the expression is best classified as semi-transparent.
Etymology
Kill your darlings comes from advice by older writers who told each other to cut out parts they loved. The word darlings means favourite lines or ideas and kill here means to remove them. So it means 'remove parts of your writing you are attached to so the work is better'.