Distinctive

By Adam Muri-Rosenthal, Ph.D.

If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘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.’

– Arthur Quiller-Couch, British Literary Critic

Increase the font size, make the page margins bigger, or create an invisible header and footer, but never—NEVER—cut words. It’s the mantra that any high school student in the throes of their graphological education knows well, because at the high school level our essay goals are defined by quantity (“four pages, double-spaced”), not quality. Where quality is concerned, the most scrupulous high school teachers will require the submission of a rough draft to be marked up, liberated of orthographic and grammatical errors, and resubmitted as what is rather dubiously referred to as a final draft, but it is rare indeed for students to be asked to undertake a more meticulous process of revision. For these students, transitioning from a mentality of merely sufficing to one of excelling is one of the greatest challenges in the college application process. 

There are two reasons for this. One is a difference of comparison; the other a difference of repercussions and returns. To receive the highest marks on a high school essay, a student’s work must equal or outshine that of the other 25 students in their class. In the college applications process, however, not only is the bar higher—your work may be compared to that of 80,000 other applicants—but so are the stakes. College essay writers vie not for grades, but rather, for their futures.

Both of these factors must have a massive influence on the attitude we take towards our personal statements and supplemental essays. My students are often surprised (and exasperated) when, fourteen or fifteen revisions in, I am continuing to push them to improve and polish their essays. I get it. My demands of them so far surpass the level of quality required by their scholastic experience that my insistence probably seems to crest a peak of absurdity. And yet successful applications depend on essays that cling to the memories of admissions officers as incessantly as the most cognitively indelible earworms. 

One of the surest ways to arrive at such echelons of quality is to ruthlessly eliminate anything that is extraneous to your narrative. And sometimes even the best writing does not contribute substantively to the story you are trying to tell… which leads me (thank you for your patience) to the idea of “murdering your darlings,” as the phrase was originally coined but which has also been referred to more recently by Stephen King (in his marvelous memoir On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft) as “killing your darlings.” Simply put, killing your darlings means relinquishing what may seem like your best work in the service of your narrative. Incidentally, it’s an idea that inheres in other art forms as well. Filmmakers from Coppola to Kubrick have insisted on the idea that the first thing you must do after shooting a film is to throw out your best shot. Similarly, Alfred Hitchcock famously stated, “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”

Whatever form of the phrase you prefer, “killing your darlings” bespeaks the moral quandary of the action: how can we (and why would we) extinguish something we hold so dear?

Let’s start with why. Your best writing (or in the filmmaking world, your best shot) is very hard to let go of, and as such an unfailing allegiance to it can become a colossal distraction from the task of assembling a strong, cohesive narrative. By retaining these marvelously crafted (but irrelevant) baubles of writing, the rest of your narrative is inevitably siphoned off into the orbit of their gravitational pull. The resulting system may boast cosmic beauty, but that doesn’t mean that it is capable of supporting life. 

Killing your darlings, destructive though it may seem, is therefore an essential act of affirmation: affirmation of the rest of your narrative. Mary Douglas, one of my favorite anthropologists, in her seminal work on the concept of dirt (or, as she puts it, “matter out of place”) calls eliminating the extraneous an act of “positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea […] a creative movement, an attempt to relate form to function, to make unity of experience.” 

Hopefully you are with me so far on why killing your darlings is so important. Let’s explore how—and here we return to the world of filmmaking for an answer. In his marvelous monograph on the art of filmmaking, Making Movies, acclaimed director Sidney Lumet writes that every film must be about one thing, and one thing only:

For now, suffice it to say that the theme (the what of the movie) is going to determine the style (the how of the movie). The theme will decide the specifics of every selection made in all the following chapters. I work from the inside out. What the movie is about will determine how it will be cast, how it will look, how it will be edited, how it will be musically scored, how it will be mixed, how the titles will look, and, with a good studio, how it will be released. What it’s about will determine how it is to be made.

The same is true of writing, and especially the writing of college essays, with its requirement for such a tight, unerring narrative. What is your essay really about? Once you know that, every aspect of your essay must conform: from word choice to narrative, style to theme. Anything that doesn’t serve the purpose should be binned—even your best writing.

All of this amounts to a paradigm shift in the minds of most of my students. When I slate large swaths of their text (whether deserving of affection or aversion) for deletion, there is a conspicuous pain in their eyes. But remember, killing your darlings, violent though it may seem, is a sacrifice in the service of a higher purpose.