Editing: Murdering Your Darlings

Good morning. Dale is out of the garage.

He's been waiting for this. He's cracked his little raccoon knuckles. He has a red pen in his tiny hands, which is honestly unsettling, and he's ready to go through your draft like it's a trash can behind a seafood restaurant. Today, Dale is your friend. Today you let him rummage.

"Kill your darlings" is old writing advice, passed around for about a century. It means: the lines you're proudest of are often the ones you need to cut, because you're keeping them for yourself. The reader never asked for them. That clever pun in paragraph four? The paragraph about the history of cast iron you spent 50 minutes researching? If they don't help prove your cousin-test sentence, they go.

It hurts. Marge says it gets easier. She's lying, kindly.

Edit in passes, big to small

Don't try to fix everything in one read. You'll fix commas in a paragraph you should have deleted. Make several trips through the draft, each looking for one kind of problem.

1. The point pass. Read the whole thing fast. Does the lede match your cousin-test sentence? Is the nut graf in the first three or four paragraphs? Is the most important stuff near the top?
2. The paragraph pass. Does every paragraph do one job? Does every one help prove your point? Mark anything that doesn't with [CUT?], then actually cut it.
3. The placeholder pass. Search for "[" and resolve every bracket from your draft. Check each fact against your source log. Fill it or remove it.
4. The sentence pass. Read aloud. Fix anything clunky.
5. The word pass. Hunt filler, cliches and robot-speak (lists below).

The read-aloud test

Read your entire draft out loud. Not in your head. Out loud, with your mouth, like a person in a play nobody asked to see. Your dog may leave the room. Your dog has never published anything.

Your ear catches what your eye skips. You'll notice:

• Sentences so long you run out of breath. Split them.
• Missing words. Your eye fills them in. Your mouth trips over the gap.
• The same word three times in two sentences.
• Every sentence the same length, thudding along like a washing machine with a shoe in it. Mix short and long. Like this. Then follow a short one with something that stretches out and takes its time before it lands.
• Anything you'd never say to an actual person. If you wouldn't say "utilize" at a barbecue, don't write it.

Filler: the words that do nothing

These words pad sentences without adding meaning. Search your draft for each one. Most can just be deleted.

Cliches: phrases that died years ago

A cliche is a phrase used so often it no longer makes a picture in anyone's head. Readers glide right over it, and worse, it tells them you're not paying attention. Marge has a jar on her desk (not that jar) where she drops a quarter every time she sees one of these. She bought a boat with it.

"Critics say" deserves special mention. If someone criticized the decision, name them. "Councilwoman Tess Banks said..." If you can't name anyone, you don't have critics. You have a feeling.

And "heated debate" and "packed house": tell the reader what happened instead. "Thirty-one residents spoke during two hours of public comment. Twenty-six opposed the increase." Now they can picture the room.

Robot-speak: sounding like a machine wrote it

Lots of text online is now produced by AI tools, and readers have learned to smell it. Even if you wrote every word yourself, certain phrasing reads as machine-made, and readers stop trusting it. The giveaways: grand abstract words, no names, no numbers, everything "complex" and "multifaceted," and sentences that sound like a motivational poster tripped and fell into a budget report.

There are sentence shapes, too. Watch for these habits:

• The fake reveal: "This isn't just about water. It's about trust."
• The automatic three: "The decision was bold, controversial and necessary." Three adjectives, every time, like a drumbeat.
• The announcement: "There are three key reasons this matters." Just give the reasons.
• The wise-sounding wrap-up at the end of every paragraph: "And that's what makes it so important."

The fix is always the same: replace the abstraction with the specific thing. Who? What number? Which street? If the sentence can't answer, cut it.

A full before and after

Two thirds shorter, and nothing lost except fog. "Since 2021" might belong somewhere else. Dale ate it. Dale is very pleased with himself.

How much to cut

A healthy first edit removes 20 to 30 percent of the draft. If your draft was 1,100 words, aim for about 800. If you can't find that much to cut, read it aloud again, slower. It's in there. It always is.