It's time to murder your darlings

Be brave and destroy your favourite ideas.

Author

Maxy Lotherington
April 09, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

If you’re working in tech, a big part of your job is coming up with ideas. Today’s post is inspired by one of my favourite pieces of writing advice, and can be applicable to anyone who comes up with ideas!

(To keep this from sounding too generic, I have focused today on how a copywriter might apply this advice – but I do genuinely believe it’s relevant beyond the creative roles.)

Sometimes, you’ll fall in love with what you write. You’ll craft this line that is so clever, sharp, and rhythmic that you can’t imagine using anything else.

All writers experience this. The difference between decent writers and great writers is that the great ones are able to murder their darlings.

To murder your darlings is to brave, and recognise when a beautiful piece of prose does not support your actual goals, and so must be revised or removed. It can sting to do it, but you must remember that the purpose of writing is not to fuel your own ego: it’s to achieve a certain goal for the business.

Here’s the original passage from “On the Art of Writing” about murdering your darlings:

To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is not; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, “On the Art of Writing”

Murdering your darlings doesn’t have to be forever. You might be able to reuse or rework your line later when it’s more suitable, so if it helps, tell yourself it’s a “not now” instead of a “no, never.”

You might want to keep a log of “darlings” you’ve murdered for later – you can keep them in a notebook or a digital notes page to refer to when you get stuck. Now you’ve also got a list of inspiration to jump off for later!

Let’s move out of the copywriting world and think about some ways we can apply this to some other fields:

  • When designing, I typically add a page on Figma called “Scratchpad” where I keep all of my rejected UI concepts. Giving them a home always makes me feel better than outright deleting them!

  • You could use a digital bookmarking tool (I use MyMind) to keep ideas or inspiration for later.

  • You could use a notebook (or a digital notebook tool like Notion) to keep more structured ideas or thoughts.

Being conscious of when you’ve gotten overly-attached to an idea can also help you to murder it. Take a step back from what you’re working on and assess: “Am I doing this because I love it, or because it’s necessary?”

This week was a bit different to usual, but I hope some of you still found it valuable! Let me know by commenting or replying 👇️ if you enjoyed something a bit more craft-specific.

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