Create No Darlings, Kill No Darlings
Love the whole, not just some of its parts.
The writing guidance "kill your darlings" is a call to cut whatever doesn't serve your story, argument, or angle — even if you think it's a stroke of linguistic genius. It could mean cutting a beloved character because they don't move the plot or deleting a pretty paragraph that's tangential to your thesis.
The spirit of this advice is spot-on, but the delivery is all wrong. To create something that's coherent, concise, and compelling, you need to be ruthless. But the idea of killing your darlings makes it seem like the creative process is painful and traumatic.
It's not, or at least it doesn't have to be. The real problem is creating darlings, not whether you kill them.
Preserve the Process
For any craft — whether it be writing, architecture, music, or athletics — it's true that the only way to improve is through iteration.
Have an idea.
Try and succeed/fail.
Learn, have a new idea, and try again.
Darlings stall the process. You can't override weaknesses or learn from mistakes if you're concerned about your darlings.
Should an architect redesign the whole first floor to preserve the darling dimensions of a front door?
Should a producer spend weeks searching for that darling hi-hat sound he once heard instead of releasing the track?
Should a tennis player keep his darling one-handed backhand because it looks cool, even though it loses him matches?
If you create darlings, you risk sacrificing the whole to preserve its parts. And if you have darlings, the only way forward is to kill them.
But what if you loved your house instead of the door, the track instead of the hi-hat, the game of tennis instead of your one-hander? What if you loved the whole, rather than just some of its parts?
Loving the whole means pouncing on any part that could be better and not letting anything prevent you from shipping the project.
You don't have to kill what you love. Just change what you love. If you don't create darlings, you won't have to kill any.
Springboard:
Do you have a project in the draft phase? Is there some part of it that you're attached to that's holding you back? Would you rather ship the whole or save that part?
P.S. Have you ever wondered what absurdism and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have in common? Check out my recent blog post, "Sisyphus in the Sunshine," to explore the parallels between doomed romance narratives and Albert Camus's philosophy.