Don't kill your darlings, save them for later
- Jessica Heine
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
The best songwriting advice I ever received didn’t come from a music class. It came during a creative non-fiction writing course I took in university. The professor said:
“Just because it’s good doesn’t mean it’s right for this story.” It is not a new idea. You may have heard it as, "kill your darlings" or "murder your darlings", and it is from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's book, On the Art of Writing (1916), where he counselled we should not hold onto something we like at the expense of the story.
This line of thinking changed the way I write. Up until that point, I felt that if I had written it, the only changes that could be made were for grammar, spelling and punctuation, but the feel and body of the work needed to remain. Writing this now, over twenty years later feels crazy, because I have long since let go of any such idea.
At first, it was very difficult to cut lyrics I loved, but I soon learned to love my new Frankenstein process of songwriting even more; different lines can be saved to be used at a later time. Not every word needs to go in right now. Some lines are meant to traded out and placed in your pocket, where they sit quite comfortably until the right moment comes along. I’ve got many of these, a word, a sentence, a half-finished verse, bridges. Hell, I've had whole songs transform before my eyes into something so different that I've then pulled most of the original skeleton of an idea back to hang in the closet until I find different words to build around it.
The songs that have come from this process are better for what they have lost. And there are songs that have come from what was removed that would have never been born had I not learned to let go. Next time you're writing something, I would ask you keep in mind, just because it's good, doesn't mean it's right for any given song, but my counsel would be, don't kill your darlings, create a safe place for them to live, visit often, and take them out for walks regularly.
