George Meredith on 'Killing One's Darlings'

A 2024 exhibition at Oxford’s Weston Library centred on an old saw of writing advice: ‘Kill your darlings’. Gallery notes attributed the quip to Stephen King, but clarified that the phrase ‘originated in a lecture by the British author Q, pseudonym of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’.1 The exhibition detailed the process of composition and revision as evident in manuscript materials of numerous authors, including the fair copy of Quiller-Couch’s 1914 lecture ‘On Style’, the basis for his later volume On the Art of Writing. The line ‘Murder your darlings’ appears in both, underlined in the manuscript and italicized in the printed version: ‘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’.2 Quiller-Couch’s advice was offered in the context of eliminating unnecessary flourish: ‘[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.’