There’s a sentence I wrote about six months ago that I still think about sometimes. It described the way a morning felt, the stillness of it, the particular quality of early quiet before anyone else was awake. I spent a long time on it. Rearranged the words until they had a rhythm I loved. Read it out loud to make sure it sounded right.

Then I deleted it.

Not because it was bad. It wasn’t. It might have been one of the best sentences I’d ever written.

I deleted it because it didn’t belong there. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t doing anything. It just sat in the middle of a scene, showing off, while the story waited politely for it to finish.

That deletion taught me something I’m still learning: sometimes the writing I’m most proud of is exactly what needs to go.

The Darlings Problem

There’s that famous advice about killing your darlings. I’d heard it a hundred times before I really understood what it meant.

I used to think it was about cutting stuff you liked but that was obviously flawed. Clunky sentences you’d grown attached to. Scenes that didn’t work but felt comfortable. That kind of thing.

But that’s not quite it. The real darlings, the dangerous ones, are the pieces of writing that are genuinely good. Beautiful, even. The sentences you’re proud of. The paragraphs that make you feel like a real writer.

Those are harder to cut. Because they’re not broken. They’re just in the wrong place. Or serving the wrong purpose. Or serving no purpose at all except to exist and be admired.

I’ve learned to be suspicious of my favorite sentences now. Not because they’re bad, but because my affection for them can blind me to whether they’re actually earning their place.

What “Pretty” Writing Often Does Wrong

I want to be careful here, because I’m not saying beautiful prose is a problem. Some of my favorite writers have stunning sentence-level craft. The way they put words together is part of why I read them.

But there’s a difference between prose that’s beautiful and functional, and prose that’s beautiful and decorative.

Functional beauty serves the story. It creates mood. Reveals character. Controls pacing. Makes you feel something specific that the narrative needs you to feel in that moment.

Decorative beauty just sits there. It says, notice me, notice how well-crafted I am. And while the reader is noticing the sentence, they’ve stopped experiencing the story.

I catch myself writing decorative prose more often than I’d like to admit. Usually it happens when I’m avoiding something difficult. A transition I don’t know how to handle. A character moment I haven’t fully figured out. An emotional beat that scares me.

Instead of doing the hard work, I’ll write a pretty description of something. The room. The weather. The quality of the silence. And it’ll feel good because I’m producing words that sound nice. But I’m not actually moving forward. I’m just decorating the spot where I got stuck.

A Specific Example

Let me try to make this concrete.

I was working on a scene where two characters were having an argument. The tension had been building for chapters. This was the moment where everything was supposed to come out.

But the argument wasn’t working. It felt flat. The dialogue was functional but not alive.

So I did what I always do when I’m struggling: I added description. I wrote a paragraph about the kitchen where they were standing. The way the afternoon had turned heavy and gray. The sound of a neighbor’s dog barking somewhere outside. The pressure in the room, how it felt like something about to crack.

That paragraph was good. I really liked it. It had sensory details and atmosphere and sentences that flowed nicely.

But when I read the scene back, something was off. The argument had even less energy than before. The pretty paragraph had slowed everything down right at the moment when things should have been accelerating.

I realized what I’d done. I’d used the description to delay the conflict. To give myself a break from the hard part. The characters were supposed to be fighting, and instead I’d sent them on a detour through my lovely atmospheric writing.

So I cut the paragraph. All of it. And I made myself stay in the argument. Stay in the discomfort. Let the characters say the ugly, unpolished things that needed to be said.

The scene got better. Not because my prose got prettier, but because I stopped hiding behind prettiness.

The Ego Part

Here’s the uncomfortable thing I’ve had to admit to myself.

Sometimes I write beautiful sentences because I want to be perceived as a good writer. Not for the story. For me. For my ego.

I want someone to read a particular sentence and think, wow, that’s really well-written. I want to prove something, maybe to myself, about my skill level.

But readers don’t experience stories sentence by sentence. They experience them as a continuous flow. And a sentence that calls attention to itself, no matter how skillful, interrupts that flow.

The best prose, I’m starting to think, is often invisible. You don’t notice it because you’re too absorbed in the story. You’re not admiring the writing. You’re living inside it.

That’s a humbling thing to realize. It means the goal isn’t to write sentences that make people stop and admire my craft. It’s to write sentences that keep people moving, feeling, wanting to know what happens next.

Sometimes beautiful writing does that. Sometimes it gets in the way.

Learning to tell the difference is harder than I expected.

What I’m Learning to Ask

When I’m editing now, I try to ask different questions about the sentences I love most.

Not “Is this good?” Because that’s not the right question. The sentence might be very good. That’s not the point.

Instead I try to ask: What is this sentence doing? Is it moving the story forward, revealing character, creating necessary mood? Or is it just being beautiful?

Would the reader miss this if it were gone? Not miss the prettiness, but miss something essential to understanding or experiencing the scene?

Am I keeping this because it serves the story or because it serves my ego?

Is this the right pace for this moment? Does the story need to slow down here for description and atmosphere, or does it need to keep moving?

These questions are hard to answer honestly. My affection for my own writing makes me want to justify keeping everything. I can always construct a reason why a sentence is necessary.

But if I sit with the questions long enough, usually I know. There’s a difference between a sentence that belongs and a sentence I just don’t want to lose. The belonging feels sturdy. The not-wanting-to-lose feels like clutching.

The Grief of Cutting

I don’t want to pretend this is easy. It isn’t.

Deleting something you worked hard on, something you’re genuinely proud of, feels like a small grief. You made this thing. You shaped it carefully. And now you’re saying it doesn’t get to exist in the story.

Sometimes I save the deleted sentences in a separate document. A graveyard file. I tell myself I might use them somewhere else, in another story, someday.

I almost never do. But having the graveyard makes the cutting easier. The sentence isn’t being destroyed, just moved. Set aside. It still exists, even if no one will ever read it.

Maybe that’s a crutch. Maybe I should be braver about truly letting go. But for now, the graveyard helps. It gives me permission to cut things I love without feeling like I’m losing them forever.

What Changes When You Let Go

Something surprising happens when I manage to cut the pretty writing that isn’t working.

The story breathes. There’s space that wasn’t there before. The things that actually matter become more visible.

And often, the writing around the cut gets better. I’ll notice that a simple sentence I barely thought about is doing more work than the elaborate one I spent an hour crafting. The story’s energy was there all along. My darling was just blocking it.

I’ve also noticed that readers rarely miss what I’ve removed. I’ll agonize over cutting a paragraph I love, convinced it’s essential, and then no one ever mentions its absence. Because it wasn’t essential. It was just mine.

That’s the difference, maybe. Some writing is for the story. Some writing is for the writer. The trick is learning to tell which is which, and being willing to let go of the second kind.

Still Learning

I haven’t mastered this. Not even close.

I still write decorative prose when I’m stuck. I still fall in love with sentences that don’t belong. I still resist cutting things I’ve worked hard on.

But I’m getting better at noticing. At asking the questions. At being honest with myself about what the story needs versus what I want to keep.

And I’m learning to trust that cutting a beautiful sentence doesn’t make me less of a writer. It might make me more of one. Because it means I’m prioritizing the story over my own ego. The reader’s experience over my desire to be admired.

That’s hard. But I think it might be the work.

A Question

Have you had to cut something you loved? Something you were proud of, that just wasn’t serving the story?

I’m curious how other writers handle this. Whether it gets easier. Whether you’ve found ways to let go that don’t feel like loss.

Or maybe you disagree with all of this. Maybe you think beautiful writing is always worth keeping, that the prose itself has value beyond function. I’d be interested in that perspective too.

Either way, I’m still figuring it out. Sentence by sentence. Cut by cut.