Compost Your Darlings!
or, why & how to get comfy with cutting out the parts of our songs that don't work
“Kill your darlings!” Have you heard this advice? I first heard it in English class. Google says it’s commonly attributed to Faulkner.
“Kill your darlings” means, get rid of the stuff that doesn’t strengthen your song. Even if you love that stuff. Even if you hate the idea of deleting it.
For example, say you’ve got a song with four verses, and one of them doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the song. While you absolutely love this verse, you have a nagging sense the song would be stronger without it.
What do you do!?
Faulkner might say, kill that verse. Delete it. And I would 100% agree with him, but I would phrase it slightly differently:
Don’t just kill that verse. Compost it.
Add it to your heap of unused ideas. (Maybe that’s a note on your phone, or a page in the back of your notebook, or just a jumble in your brain.) In time, that stray verse might grow into something. But it doesn’t have to be part of a song now.
“Composting” has helped me get comfy with reworking my songs. It might sound intimidating at first, but for me, it’s actually become a joyful part of songwriting. Composting accomplishes two great things simultaneously:
- it strengthens my songs by getting rid of parts that don’t fit, and
- it affirms my joy for having written those parts in the first place.
When I compost a part of a song, I don’t say to myself, “This part is bad. Kill it with fire.” I say, “This part came from a real place, but it doesn’t belong in this song. It might belong somewhere else, sometime later.”
I have a backlog of “darlings” in a “compost” pile in my Notes app. Occasionally, I return to this compost pile and find a flower growing from it.
You may have heard variations on this advice: “recycle your darlings,” “relocate your darlings,” and so on. I say “compost” because I believe that we as writers can safely allow our “darlings” to disintegrate.
That precious extra verse that we hate to delete? If we throw it in the heap for now and return to it later, we may find that its meaning has transformed, or that pieces of it no longer seem important, while others still glow with power. Through composting, we allow old ideas to break apart and feed into new ones.
So, the next time you’re trying to figure out whether a song is too long, or whether it’s really “done”: try deleting parts of it. Line by line, verse by verse, idea by idea. If the song survives (or improves with) the deletion, compost the deleted part. Trust that, in time, it will become what it wants to become.
P.S. Would you like friendly guidance (or just a second pair of eyes and ears) as you revise your songs? Shoot me an email at sage@sagechristie.com or fill out this form to book a free consultation.