Writers are always told to “kill your darlings.” That means, of course, that they should learn to be comfortable with cutting lines, paragraphs, chapters and even more if they get in the way of the story. Stephen King famously cut about 400 pages, or 150,000 words, from the manuscript of his magnum opus THE STAND for its original publication. His publisher said the novel was just too long. After THE STAND was hailed as the masterpiece it is, King restored a later edition to something like the original manuscript at 1,152 pages.

I think writers can get in the way of our own success – not only in terms of publication but also story merit – when we’re reluctant to kill our darlings.

That doesn’t make it an easy thing.

I wrote “Door to Door,” published this week by Pistol Jim Press – link at the end of this post – in 2024 for a call for submissions for stories about cults. It got rejected.

So when editor Martine Proctor and Pistol Jim honcho James Maxwell posted a call for stories about doors, portals and gates, it seemed like a good time to revive and sub “Door to Door.”

The only problem? The original was about a third again as long as the 1,000 words or so that the call for subs wanted.

So I cut two or three hundred words. For a story of that length, that’s a lot of dead darlings. It’s not the most I’ve cut from a story, though. I cut some dialogue and I cut a few details, but the point of the story still came through.

I liked the original version of the story and I like the new version. And feedback by people who’ve read it is good.

I should note here that the story was inspired by something that happened in real life: I was home one uncomfortably warm day a few years ago and a young woman came to the door selling magazine subscriptions or something. She literally looked like she was about to faint from the heat and I invited her in and gave her a glass of water.

No murder ensued, however, unlike in the story. No magazine subscriptions ensued either.

I very well might have written some other story for the Pistol Jim call for subs, but it worked out well to give the original, rejected story a shot. Albeit in a slimmed-down version.

Writers should still kill their darlings, especially when it’s necessary. (Says the guy who might publish a 108,000-word novel, GHOST SHOW, in the coming months.)

But even dead darlings can have a new life in some altered form.

Say, that sounds like a story idea …

Here’s my story “Door to Door” for Pistol Jim:

https://pistoljimpress.substack.com/p/door-to-door-by-keith-roysdon