Though I have been hearing (or rather reading) it a lot lately in many venues, it was a little odd — even a bit unsettling — to read it in the New York Times:
My favorite part of writing is taking stuff out. “In writing, you must kill all your darlings,” William Faulkner famously wrote, suggesting that the process of self-editing requires stoicism and the suppression of a natural affection. Samuel Johnson said something similar: “Read over your compositions and, wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”
The author was the novelist and…
