Yes, it's an old advice. Yes, many famous authors have said so. And still, there's a nagging doubt... why exactly is this so bad?
We don't say it's all wrong. We just don't see how this is proven for all time.
We want to explain our reasoning behind this. There are enough books (and nowadays, blogs and other websites) for writing, like this one. We've read many of them. But this particular question, they couldn't answer. Not in a way that was satisfying to us.
You can find many kinds of advice in these texts. Many of these are obvious (get your grammar right; a big vocabulary helps; research your topic; etc.)
"Kill your darlings" isn't that obviously true. How do we know so? We think this advice should be tested. There are many badfics out there which prove that other rules are there for a reason: If you break them, your story probably sucks.
If "Kill your darlings" is a useful advice, it should be possible to falsify it. If someone decided to deliberately break it, the resulting story should be obviously bad.
So this is the challenge: Where do we find a story where the author didn't kill his darlings, but on the contrary, raised and spoiled them rotten, so to speak? Is there a story like that out there, and if yes, where?
Hope you like our challenge.
We don't say it's all wrong. We just don't see how this is proven for all time.
We want to explain our reasoning behind this. There are enough books (and nowadays, blogs and other websites) for writing, like this one. We've read many of them. But this particular question, they couldn't answer. Not in a way that was satisfying to us.
You can find many kinds of advice in these texts. Many of these are obvious (get your grammar right; a big vocabulary helps; research your topic; etc.)
"Kill your darlings" isn't that obviously true. How do we know so? We think this advice should be tested. There are many badfics out there which prove that other rules are there for a reason: If you break them, your story probably sucks.
If "Kill your darlings" is a useful advice, it should be possible to falsify it. If someone decided to deliberately break it, the resulting story should be obviously bad.
So this is the challenge: Where do we find a story where the author didn't kill his darlings, but on the contrary, raised and spoiled them rotten, so to speak? Is there a story like that out there, and if yes, where?
Hope you like our challenge.