Kill Your Darlings, But Keep Them Too

 You hear the advice everywhere. Kill your darlings, if it doesn’t serve plot or character development it has to go, this is eating up your pacing. All of this is solid advice. Not following this advice leads to bloated writing.

Killing your darlings, though, shouldn’t include deleting them from existence. It’s a lot more beneficial to writers to put them to the side. In what’s often called a scene graveyard.

Regulars on this blog know I keep everything I write. I call it my Vault and post from it often. What regular readers of this blog may not know is why I stopped deleting things. 

First, it reminds you where you’ve been. Every creative, no matter what you create, goes through periods where they hate everything they’ve ever done. They’ll never be as good as they want to be and there’s no use continuing.

There’s a lot of ways to get past this point. One way of battling this is looking at old work and comparing it to new work. A graveyard is a great place for this!

Every time I look at a scene I thought was strong and compare it to what I replaced it with, I see how far I’ve come in just a few rounds of self editing. It’s great for the confidence.

Another purpose of keeping a graveyard is to make it easier to say, “Not for this one,” on the scenes you love but can’t keep.

You can still love the scene, you can still read the scene, you can even still revamp it into another scene for another project. This leads us into the next reason it’s a good idea to keep a graveyard.

Inspiration. 

Whether you’ve hit writers block or just struggling to find an idea you’re excited about, going through the ideas you’ve had and not been able to use can help.

Often in my own writing, I find myself looking through the cut scenes to figure out why A and B connect, but C just won’t tie in anymore. Almost always I find the missing connective tissue there. Sometimes I find it in an old practice piece. 

When looking for inspiration for a new project I look through everything. From my pipeline of ideas, to my cut scenes, to warmup exercises. 

Ultimately, just because you need to kill your darlings, doesn’t mean they can’t help build your writing. 

Do you keep a scene graveyard? Comment below to let me know.