Murder Your Darlings.

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — wholeheartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. - Sir Authur Quiller-Couch

Last week, I was interviews by Aniah Oliver for her Building Wealth 101 podcast. In the interview she asked me “What would be the one piece of advice that you would want to give to entrepreneurs?” I don’t know where the idea popped into my head, but the quote “kill your darlings” came into my head.

As I am in the middle of writing a book, I decided to review some books to help become a better writer and story-teller. My favorite that I came across was Stephen King’s On Writing. It does a great job of explain how he became a writer along with tips for the writing process. One of my favorite quotes is "revolves around this topic.

If you are a writer, you have probably heard this advice before. “Killing your darlings” is the act of deleting you favorite bits of dialogue or description because they do not fit the story. No matter how much you may love that one sentence, you need to get rid of it if it does not fit in the story. It is a difficult thing to delete work that you are proud of, but it is necessary.

As an entrepreneur, you have to be willing to murder your darlings in brutal fashion. It does not matter how clever you thought you were. IT does not matter how much it reminds you of the old days. IT does not matter how much you want to believe it is true. You need to kill your darlings when something better comes along.

The title of my book was nearly “We Have Always Done It This Way”. I was going to name it that because there are so many “darling” pieces of sales advice that no longer serve us as salespeople.

If you are reading this I hope all of your darlings are on the table. Everything is up for challenge and debate.

“Kill your darlings. kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.” - Stephen King