LAST WEEK IN CLASS, the question was raised about how to edit yourself, and suddenly everyone looked at their shoes. It’s a reaction I’ve come to expect as well as adore. And it makes sense. I mean, who wants to murder one’s darlings?

In his prickly 1916 tome, On the Art of Writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) opines that you must “murder your darlings,” and if there is a phrase more beloved by writers, I cannot think of it. People seem to adore it, almost as much as they rest assured that it applies to everyone’s work but their own. Few writers are actually willing to follow this advice; perhaps none are memoirists.

When Quiller-Couch (seen at left) penned it, he was making the distinction between style and plain bad writing: “Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament.” Later, he gave us his famous instruction: “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.”

Elmore Leonard later qualified this for a modern audience: “If I come across anything in my work that smacks of ‘good writing,’ I immediately strike it out.”

When this topic is raised in my class, I default to a short talk on sin, and how from the first word you lay down, writing memoir will pretty much divide your time between committing sins of omission and sins of commission, during which you will soon realize that much as in life, what’s left out may haunt you nearly as much as what gets included. In short, you must learn how to edit yourself.

“But it’s a lovely sentence,” someone will whine, defending their darling when I edit it out. And that’s the problem. It may be, but understanding that writing is not about those single flourishes, and instead about the piece as a whole, is the first step toward learning how to commit the perfect murder—a good final edit.