Kill your darlings.

This is the command given young writers when they're learning to edit their stories and poems. (It usually comes directly after the first piece of advice for novice authors: Quit now.)

Kill ‘em dead. The line is attributed variously now to Faulkner, now to Hemingway. Extrapolated, it's something like, ‘take your best sentences, and get rid of them. Chances are, if you're impressed with your own writing, you're being too cute.' Really it's just another injunction highlighting the masochistic aspects of this practice. Editing is peeling away dead skin, but there's some pain involved.

Vladimir Nabokov compares a first draft to a loogey you've coughed into a tissue - it's this ugly thing that you don't want to show anyone, but also it came from deep inside you. At the end of his life, it seems the author of Lolita and Pale Fire took the editorial call to arms a step further than most.

Nabokov died in 1977, leaving behind 138 index cards with a draft of his last novel, The Original of Laura, scribbled on them, and instructions that the cards should be destroyed. (In terms of darling killing, this is something like being an accomplice to murder, I think.) Last week, Dmitri Nabokov - Vladimir's son - announced he was publishing the manuscript.