Avi

word craft

blog

Writing less

delete keyIf you are a writer there are many rea­sons to love the com­put­er. It does make writ­ing eas­i­er. But it also makes books big­ger, as in more words and more pages. Books are longer these days, despite the fact that it is just as sim­ple to remove text as to add it. Eas­i­er, actu­al­ly. But psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly, I think one tends to add rather than sub­tract. That, I think, is a pity. Famous­ly, Shake­speare, in Ham­let, has Polo­nius, Ophelia’s long-wind­ed father, say:

There­fore, since brevi­ty is the soul of wit,
And tedious­ness the limbs and out­ward flourishes,
I will be brief. Your noble son is mad.…

[See my Decem­ber 13, 2013 post for Samuel Johnson’s thoughts on prolixity.]

One of the most impor­tant on-going writ­ing lessons I ever had was, curi­ous­ly, writ­ing book reviews for the School Library Jour­nal many, many years ago. I was a young writer then (still writ­ing plays) and was more than hap­py to write long, two-page reviews of books. How­ev­er, SLJ only want­ed short reviews, at most a para­graph. Out of neces­si­ty, I would take those long reviews and then try to use few­er words to say the same thing.

The point is, I could.

To this day I write on, and on, and then work back­ward, and cut, and cut, and cut. Famous­ly, “Less is always more.” As my writer friend, Rachel Vail once said to me, “The most impor­tant key on my key­board is the delete key.”

Slo­gan of the day: You can always write bet­ter by writ­ing less.

3 thoughts on “Writing less”

  1. After I meet with my cri­tique group, I am always so pleased to see sub­se­quent revi­sions reduced by hun­dreds of words. A writer’s mantra could be par­al­leled to the Dow Scrub­bing Bub­bles say­ing: “We work hard so you don’t have to.”

    Reply

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.