‘Kill your darlings,’ the writing teacher’s commandment for which this site is named, is a most useful and robust metaphor. It doesn’t just tell writers to mistrust themselves when they become especially enamored of a bit of their writing, but…
Building on his critically acclaimed short story collection, Corpus Christi, Bret Anthony Johnston’s debut novel “Remember Me Like This” traces the emotional progress of the Campbell family following a teenage son’s reappearance four years after an abduction. Bret took time…
All of us at Dead Darlings are thrilled to meet the new crop of Novel Incubator students at this year’s Muse and the Marketplace, GrubStreet’s annual writing conference. We asked incoming student, Bonnie Waltch, to give us some insight into…
Here are four things you notice while revising. Maybe not the top four things, but definitely up there somewhere. In the top twenty. Based on a metric I made up just now and will not share. 1. You use the…
You won’t find a Best of/Worst of post over here at Dead Darlings headquarters. We’re too tired from writing and revisioning and meeting class deadlines. Instead we decided to toast the new year by asking our writing colleagues to lift…
Following up on her critically-acclaimed debut novel Cloud Cuckoo Land, Lisa Borders’ new release, The Fifty-First State, explores the lives of half-siblings Hallie and Josh Corson, brought together in Southern New Jersey following their parents’ untimely deaths. An influential Grub…