More or less a year ago, I sent a piece to a domain-specific media outlet for an op ed. In the reviewing process, the editor-in-chief wrote back with some feedback:
Highlighted areas are where I got confused, lost, or impatient. Culprits include liberal use of rhetorical asides and concealing your meaning in flowery language. Get out those pruning shears and don’t be afraid to kill your darlings.
“Kill your darlings,” he said. This left me a bit puzzled. Luckily, he kindly provided me with a link to the definition of the phrase. Turns out, you kill your darlings when you decide to get rid of an unnecessary storyline or sentences in a piece of writing, including elements you may have worked real hard to create but still must go for the sake of the overall story. Killing your darlings is hard, because you feel you are stripping the piece from its very soul. Strangely enough, once you gather the courage and cut them with the shears, things are still more than fine. In fact, things are better.
Since I started to write more, I have noticed the importance of the editing process. It’s not so much about what you write, but about what you want to say with the least amount of twists and turns possible. Sounds like a platitude, but it’s painfully complicated to do. What’s more, the ultimate feat is to avoid writing anything new but to grab existing things you wrote before and stitch them together in a slightly different manner to tell a new story. Frankenstein-style. Content is recyclable, malleable, and morphable.
The editor mindset does not strictly belong to the writing domain. Everyday life requires us to think as editors. The editing process involves correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with the intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate and complete piece of work, whatever that is; a document, a presentation, or source code.
Stephen King said in his On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft:
— Kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart.
In the same text, he adds:
— To write is human, to edit is divine.