Never Kill Your Babies

As a writer, I’ve heard the phrase, ‘Kill your babies,’ over and over again. I’ve heard it in almost every single writing class I’ve ever taken. As I went to school for creative writing, specifically fiction, that means I’ve heard it more than half the time I was in school. We learned that being able to do so was the most important part of the editing and revision phases.

They say that those parts aren’t as important as the rest of the narrative, which is poppycock. The best parts of a work would be the pieces that are when huge events happen, when new knowledge is learned, or when foreshadowing occurs. These are the bits of a story that we, as writers, work the hardest on. If we work the hardest on these bits, then these are the parts that are the, quote-unquote, babies. Whatever parts of a work we work the hardest on would be what editors and professors and writing teachers believe need to be heavily edited and revised, turning it from a huge part of your work into something wishy washy and flat.

To me, I always believed this was nonsense. I believe we should keep our babies, flesh them out, and make them indispensable. 

Do you know what happens if you follow an editor’s sense or a professor’s sense of, ‘kill your babies’? You end up with crap, crap, crap, and mostly crap. In my mind, the best way to deal with your favorite parts of your writing, is to make sure that every little bit of words you’ve written are ‘babies’. If everything you create is the best you’ve done, as you’ve been pushing yourself to the brink of ‘passed best’, then when you need to erase things, your babies will still be there.

To me, it doesn’t make sense that unimportant parts of a work would be babies. That term, the parts of our writing that we love the best and would be proud of, would be the parts we’ve worked the hardest on, which tend to be huge scenes that carry the work.

If an editor wants you to pair down on these scenes, it’ll make them weaker. Of course, professors and editors love the idea of your work being quick, succinct, and easy to read. Sometimes, depending on the narrator, that is impossible. Also sometimes, getting rid of specific details in your work is going against your style. Many writer’s styles involve painstaking details that must never be removed from a work, or else change and morph the writer’s style into what the industry wants it to be.

As someone who has a detail-oriented style, I’ve come across having to erase bits of the work that I believed created the story. Writers are so used to having to remove details that we believe it’s a part of being a writer. It’s not. Your style is your style, and most editors are so used to reading stories that sound exactly the same as everything else, that they’re not used to, and tend to be against, details that make a story sound different from other writers’s works.

We’re taught to pair down and pair down and pair down, getting rid of any details that, to the editor, aren’t important, that you learn to change your style based on other people’s ideas of the way your work should be or can be.

Also, if your favorite and best parts of your work are as important as the rest of the story or novel, deleting them won’t hurt as badly. Yes, deleting all of your babies in the work will make the entire work crap, but sometimes deleting certain parts creates a stronger story. Paying attention to what these parts tend to be will help you to learn what to delete and what not to delete.

That’s why they say that. A lot of editors and professors believe that the unimportant parts tend to be our favorite parts. For me, that’s never been the case. If a part of a story is weak, then it’s stronger without it. This automatically means that whatever the story is stronger without must not be thought of as a baby.

These parts are not parts we should cherish.

We cherish what we are proud of.

That’s why when editors remove minute details, it feels as if they’re changing the entire sound of a work — because they are.

If anyone ever tells you they believe your work would be stronger without a piece, and you believe otherwise, make sure to stand up for yourself. Explain why and how they are wrong, and if there’s a different part you believe makes the work weaker, point that out and explain why that should be deleted instead. You’re the writer. It’s your work. Take charge and own it.