Killing Your Darlings
A craft guide for writers who edit like assassins and laugh at the body count.
Killing Your Darlings: Editing as an Act of Murder
ISBN: 9781068482816
Killing Your Darlings goes beyond the cliché to become a sharp, engaging, scalpel-wielding guide to self-editing—for writers who aren’t afraid to get their hands ink-stained. With gallows humour, literary side-eyes, and brutally honest advice, Jean G-Owen leads you through the crime scene of your own draft, uncovering everything from purple prose and bloated flashbacks to sluggish pacing, beige sentences, and the occasional anatomically challenging sex scene.
Inside, you’ll find killer examples, sly checklists, writing exercises that hurt (in a good way), plus a whole graveyard of overwritten lines that should never have made it out of the first draft.
Whether you’re pruning a poem, hacking through a novel, or just trying to make your sentences behave, this book will help you cut clean—and laugh darkly while you do it.