Killing your darlings
I know this is horribly pretentious, but let me tell you one thing I have discovered about penmanship: It is much more about deleting than writing.
Taken quite literally, it has to be a little bit more writing than deleting, since eventually there is some text on the screen or paper, but as an activity on the whole, the art of removal is what makes for good or bad prose. Deletion, selection, deletion, correction and so forth.
I have worked somewhat with business development. The same laws of intellectual selection apply there. You and your team will have many more ideas than you will ever try out on the market. Of course, this is well known, and today business schools will even teach you to fail fast, meaning, I suppose, that looking for a winner, you should actually carry out much more than will ever fly.
Doing that in business, my money would run out too soon for even a few of my ideas, but writing does not cost a penny and it is fun. I think everyone should do it. Keep a diary. Write letters. Jot down your thoughts properly, not just as bullet-points, at the end of the day. All this can be conveniently done on a proper keyboard, so that the writing-deleting mechanism is fast and easy to deploy.
This must have been quite a chore before the age of computers, requiring that you keep many alternatives in your mind at the same time, that you really find your final formulation to pen down after deleting others in your head. Lots fewer today - me included - would write, simply lacking the working memory to write much more than shopping lists if it was not so easy to write, delete and re-write. How many versions of Hamlet did Shakespeare write before the one performed today was ready?
Looking at the blogosphere, sometimes I wish it were not that easy, although I urge anyone to write. Publishing is another matter.
If you want to write for others, this is especially important: You must never hesitate to remove sentences that you first love, to kill your darlings, as this maxim is usually expressed. The infatuation is deceptive, your original thought or expression is likely a cliché.
Well, there we go. Perhaps I lured you into believing that this blog post, too, must be what remains after careful consideration and lots of deleting. At least I got you to read it until the end.
Taken quite literally, it has to be a little bit more writing than deleting, since eventually there is some text on the screen or paper, but as an activity on the whole, the art of removal is what makes for good or bad prose. Deletion, selection, deletion, correction and so forth.
I have worked somewhat with business development. The same laws of intellectual selection apply there. You and your team will have many more ideas than you will ever try out on the market. Of course, this is well known, and today business schools will even teach you to fail fast, meaning, I suppose, that looking for a winner, you should actually carry out much more than will ever fly.
Doing that in business, my money would run out too soon for even a few of my ideas, but writing does not cost a penny and it is fun. I think everyone should do it. Keep a diary. Write letters. Jot down your thoughts properly, not just as bullet-points, at the end of the day. All this can be conveniently done on a proper keyboard, so that the writing-deleting mechanism is fast and easy to deploy.
This must have been quite a chore before the age of computers, requiring that you keep many alternatives in your mind at the same time, that you really find your final formulation to pen down after deleting others in your head. Lots fewer today - me included - would write, simply lacking the working memory to write much more than shopping lists if it was not so easy to write, delete and re-write. How many versions of Hamlet did Shakespeare write before the one performed today was ready?
Looking at the blogosphere, sometimes I wish it were not that easy, although I urge anyone to write. Publishing is another matter.
If you want to write for others, this is especially important: You must never hesitate to remove sentences that you first love, to kill your darlings, as this maxim is usually expressed. The infatuation is deceptive, your original thought or expression is likely a cliché.
Well, there we go. Perhaps I lured you into believing that this blog post, too, must be what remains after careful consideration and lots of deleting. At least I got you to read it until the end.
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