“Kill your darlings” means “if something is holding you back, get rid of it, even if it sounds pretty.”
That’s it! That’s all it means! It means if you’re stuck and stalled out on your story and you could fix the whole block by removing something but you’re avoiding removing that thing because it’s good, you remove that thing. That’s the darling.
It does NOT mean
That you have to get rid of your self-indulgent writing
That you should delete something just because you like it (?wtf?)
That you need to kill off characters (??? what)
That you have to pare your story down to the absolute bare bones
That you have to delete anything whatsoever if you don’t want to
The POINT is that you STOP FEELING GUILTY for throwing out good writing that isn’t SERVING THE STORY.
The POINT is that you don’t get so HUNG UP on the details that you lose sight of the BIG PICTURE.
Every time AO3 makes an update, there’s a chorus of ‘and can we please please please be able to leave kudos on each chapter pleeeeease?!?!’
In theory, this is a nice idea. We’ve all smashed the kudos button on our favourite fics, bemoaning the fact we can’t give them all the love.
But ya’ll, kudos per chapter would absolutely fucking suck.
For readers, it would suck because it would compound the existing problem of making it hard to find fics that are good and not just long - not that a fic can’t be both! But there are plenty of Pulitzer-worthy one-shots out there that are buried way way down the list when ranked by number of kudos, because they’re beneath a bunch of 50/? fics where the author lost sight of where the hell the story was going 30 chapters ago, but their fic has had 50x the chances to be viewed so has more kudos. It would encourage authors to release their fics in lots of little chapters instead of a few longer ones/one-shots as they might otherwise have done (and as might otherwise suit the story).
And for authors it would especially suck, as it would compound the existing problem of people not commenting. Kudos are very much appreciated, but comments make an author’s day; but so few people bother, and frankly, it’s disheartening. Let people just click a button to show their appreciation for each new chapter? The hits:kudos:comments ratio would get even worse than it already is.
You can already ‘give kudos’ for each chapter of a fic on AO3 - by commenting. Hell you can literally write ‘kudos!’ It will make the author smile, I promise.
I actually never thought about it like this. If you are a fic writer or reader you should definitely read this 👆
personal blog where I post fashion, social justice, social justis critique, and the occasional pissed off rant about incompetent/inadequate mental health care
