Murder your darlings — and other things writers say about editing

2. Cutting is most of the job

Elmore Leonard's line is famous because it's a rule you can actually apply on a Tuesday afternoon: "I try to leave out the parts that people skip." Note what it isn't. It isn't write beautifully. It's a claim about the reader's attention as a measurable quantity — and about the writer's obligation to notice when it lapses.

Stephen King made it arithmetic. In On Writing he passes on a formula he'd been given decades earlier on a rejection slip: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. The percentage isn't the point; the discipline of a target is. Left to instinct, most writers cut a paragraph and add two.

Isaac Bashevis Singer went furthest: "The wastebasket is a writer's best friend." Reasonable people can argue about whether that's wisdom or a Nobel laureate's swagger. But the direction of travel is consistent across a century of testimony. Drafts get better by getting shorter more often than by getting longer.

3. The cuts that hurt are the ones that count

Here is the most quoted piece of editing advice in English, and it belongs to someone almost nobody credits.

"Murder your darlings" comes from Arthur Quiller-Couch, in a Cambridge lecture published in On the Art of Writing in 1916. It is routinely attributed to Faulkner, Wilde, Chekhov, Fitzgerald, and — most often — Stephen King, who quotes it in On Writing and is careful to say he's quoting.

Quiller-Couch's point is sharper than the internet version. He isn't telling you to cut what's bad. He's telling you that the passage you're proudest of — the extravagant one, the one that announces itself as writing — is the one most likely to be serving you rather than the book. Style you can feel yourself performing is a symptom.

Dorothy Parker's confession sits somewhere near this: "I can't write five words but that I change seven." Wilde told a version of the same joke about spending a morning inserting a comma and an afternoon removing it. The joke is funny because it's a real failure mode — the writer who has confused fiddling with revision. Line-polishing a scene that shouldn't exist is the most expensive way to procrastinate.

4. You cannot read your own book

This is the truth the quotations circle without quite landing on, because it's the one that requires admitting you need someone else.

Maxwell Perkins — the editor of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wolfe, and the closest thing publishing has to a patron saint — was firm about the limits of his role: "An editor does not add to a book." He saw the job as releasing what the writer had already put there, and he was correspondingly ruthless about structure.

The counter-case is Raymond Carver, whose editor Gordon Lish cut some stories by half and rewrote their endings. The resulting collections made Carver's name and, arguably, made minimalism a movement. When the unedited manuscripts were finally published, readers found a warmer, looser, more forgiving writer underneath. Whether that was rescue or theft is still argued about — which is precisely why it's the most instructive editing story of the last fifty years. The line between serving the book and replacing it is not self-evident, even to the people standing on it.

And then there's Capote on Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing." Cheap, and not really fair to On the Road, which was revised more than the scroll legend suggests. But it survives because it names an anxiety every writer has at 2 a.m. — that fluency and quality are not the same thing, and that only distance will tell you which one you had.

Distance is the practical takeaway. Anne Lamott's phrase "shitty first drafts" works as permission, but it's really a scheduling instruction: get the draft done badly and fast, then leave it long enough that you can come back as a stranger to it. Most writers underestimate how long that takes. Weeks, not days.

A note on attribution

Two things worth knowing before you quote anyone in a workshop.

"Write drunk, edit sober" is not Hemingway. There's no source for it in anything he wrote or said. The likeliest ancestor is a line given to a dissolute poet in Peter De Vries's 1964 novel Reuben, Reuben, which reverses and complicates the idea considerably. Hemingway, by most accounts of his working habits, wrote in the morning and sober.

Tolstoy did not rewrite War and Peace seven times. His wife Sophia copied out drafts by hand, repeatedly, and the numbers attached to that labour have migrated over the years into a claim about his revision practice. He revised heavily. The specific figure is folklore.

The pattern is worth noticing on its own terms. Editing advice accretes false attributions faster than almost any other kind, probably because a hard truth sounds more bearable coming from someone famous. Quiller-Couch, a Cornish professor, gets none of the credit for the best line anyone has written on the subject.

What the quotations agree on

Strip away the epigrams and the testimony is remarkably consistent, across genres and across a century:

• The draft is raw material, not a product.

• Subtraction beats addition more often than writers expect.

• The material you're most attached to deserves the most suspicion.

• You cannot assess your own manuscript from inside it.

None of that is comfortable. It's also the closest thing the craft has to consensus — which is why the quotations survive while the fashions in prose style come and go.