Killing Your Darlings
So I'd heard the phrase "Don't be afraid to kill your darlings." before, but never fully understood what it meant, especially in regards to writing. I always took it a bit too literally, as in: actually killing your characters, or killing the project, or something of that nature. I was, of course, like, "I'm not doing that." As I've been revising my current draft however, I realized, at least in part, what it means. As I mentioned ages ago, I came up with the first two or three books of my series during my sophmore year of high school, which, if we were rounding, would be two decades ago. I wrote massive sections of my manuscript while I was still in high school, and while I've reworked wording and cut or added things throughout the years, I hadn't actually taken the step back to see if the structure of those sections actually function adequately in the broader scope of the story. I was so pleased with what I'd writt...