murder your darlings
British novelist Arthur Quiller-Couch (pen name “Q”) published a series of lectures titled On the Art of Writing (1916) while serving as a professor of English at Cambridge University. Here he warns of purple prose…
“To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is not; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not–can never be–extraneous Ornament … ‘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.’
“…’How excellent a thing is sleep,’ sighed Sancho Panza; ‘it wraps a man round like a cloak’–an excellent example…of how to say a thing concretely: a Jargoneer would have said that ‘among the beneficent qualities of sleep its capacity for withdrawing the human consciousness from the contemplation of immediate circumstances may perhaps be accounted not the least remarkable.’ How vile a thing…!”
