The Courage to Kill Our Darling Words

One of the hardest practices for me is to backspace and cut words from my writing—whether it be a novel, a short story, an article, a personal essay, or even a book review. I fear erasing those words that I labored over. I’ve grown attached to them—every single comma and period. It’s partly because I don’t want to go backward in my word count, but it’s also because I adore every word that I wrote.

But what if this resistance is what keeps me from becoming a better writer?

Oftentimes, what halts the growth on a piece of writing I’m working on is my resistance to cut away what doesn’t fit. The reason why I can’t figure out the flow of an article is frequently because I’m clinging far too tightly to a paragraph that simply doesn’t belong. When I’m stuck in a story, half the time it’s because I can’t bear to delete the scene in question or change the path of the plot because of all the hard work I’ve put in to get to that point. 

How do we then, as writers, get more comfortable with cutting, deleting, and erasing? We know we’re supposed to murder our darlings, as the famous writer’s dictum goes, but how do we actually deal that death blow to the words we hold so dearly? Perhaps as Christians, we have the upper hand in this battle, and greater freedom to hit the backspace key.

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