The quote can mean different things to different people. As Morgan's pointed out, it's probably important to clarify that it doesn't literally refer to killing off characters. It CAN refer to killing characters, yeah. But it's more than that.
It means you should be willing to discard any element of your writing if it makes the story better. And you should be willing to do that even if you're attached to it. That could be a character, yes. Or it could be sentences, paragraphs, chapters. It could be a concept, it could be a piece of imagery, it could be some aspect of the plot... whatever.
As for how true it is, well, that depends.
I broadly agree with the sentiment, in the sense that I feel there's always something that can be done to improve a piece of writing. There's got to be some way to streamline it, to bring the point across more clearly, to get to the point sooner, and so on. Typically that's going to mean cutting some material, and if so, well, so be it. Sacrifices need to be made.
Or to put it another way - think of it like this. Most of us would probably accept the idea that...no matter how good a writer you are, there's always a benefit in having a second pair of eyes, someone else to edit your work. And very often that editor or proofreader is going to suggest deleting or rephrasing stuff that you yourself would not have changed. Because they're coming at it from an external, objective, perspective.
At the same time, the aim of this exercise is to make the final piece of writing better. It's to enable the finished product to convey its core message, core idea, or...whatever the point is...with greater clarity and impact.
And by definition, that core message, core idea, or the central narrative... that's going to be one of your darlings. So it's not so much that you're lining up everything you're attached to and gunning them all down mercilessly. It's more that you're deciding which one is the favoured child, then you're brutally assassinating every possible challenger to the throne so there's no question on the rightful succession.
Is that always necessary, though?
Well.
Can we find a good story where the author didn't kill their darlings? At least in my mind, that'd be a story where the author's gone on record saying they had a particular...singular aim or objective with the work they were producing...and yet they knowingly introduced or retained elements in the work that contradicted or don't support the central aim, because they were also attached to those secondary elements.
Take Terry Pratchett's Discworld. The earliest Discworld novels were primarily intended to poke fun at high fantasy tropes. He's said that, he's made that clear. But the books also had other elements that eventually came to dominate the series - the idea of extending the infrastructural and social mechanics of a fantasy setting to encompass 21st century modernity, using it as a lens to comment on contemporary culture, and so on.
I think there's quite a lot of fiction out there where the initial book, initial episodes, films, whatever were created with XYZ goal in mind, but follow-up installments have gone places that ended up being very different, building on elements in the initial work that weren't strictly critical to the original aim. And we wouldn't have those things if their creator had been laser-focused on only delivering their initial central message, and nothing else.
EDIT: grammar fixes. derp.
-- Acyl
It means you should be willing to discard any element of your writing if it makes the story better. And you should be willing to do that even if you're attached to it. That could be a character, yes. Or it could be sentences, paragraphs, chapters. It could be a concept, it could be a piece of imagery, it could be some aspect of the plot... whatever.
As for how true it is, well, that depends.
I broadly agree with the sentiment, in the sense that I feel there's always something that can be done to improve a piece of writing. There's got to be some way to streamline it, to bring the point across more clearly, to get to the point sooner, and so on. Typically that's going to mean cutting some material, and if so, well, so be it. Sacrifices need to be made.
Or to put it another way - think of it like this. Most of us would probably accept the idea that...no matter how good a writer you are, there's always a benefit in having a second pair of eyes, someone else to edit your work. And very often that editor or proofreader is going to suggest deleting or rephrasing stuff that you yourself would not have changed. Because they're coming at it from an external, objective, perspective.
At the same time, the aim of this exercise is to make the final piece of writing better. It's to enable the finished product to convey its core message, core idea, or...whatever the point is...with greater clarity and impact.
And by definition, that core message, core idea, or the central narrative... that's going to be one of your darlings. So it's not so much that you're lining up everything you're attached to and gunning them all down mercilessly. It's more that you're deciding which one is the favoured child, then you're brutally assassinating every possible challenger to the throne so there's no question on the rightful succession.
Is that always necessary, though?
Well.
Can we find a good story where the author didn't kill their darlings? At least in my mind, that'd be a story where the author's gone on record saying they had a particular...singular aim or objective with the work they were producing...and yet they knowingly introduced or retained elements in the work that contradicted or don't support the central aim, because they were also attached to those secondary elements.
Take Terry Pratchett's Discworld. The earliest Discworld novels were primarily intended to poke fun at high fantasy tropes. He's said that, he's made that clear. But the books also had other elements that eventually came to dominate the series - the idea of extending the infrastructural and social mechanics of a fantasy setting to encompass 21st century modernity, using it as a lens to comment on contemporary culture, and so on.
I think there's quite a lot of fiction out there where the initial book, initial episodes, films, whatever were created with XYZ goal in mind, but follow-up installments have gone places that ended up being very different, building on elements in the initial work that weren't strictly critical to the original aim. And we wouldn't have those things if their creator had been laser-focused on only delivering their initial central message, and nothing else.
EDIT: grammar fixes. derp.
-- Acyl