The Craft of Editing a Very Short Story

Lydia Davis, an author of “very short stories” for more than 40 years, described her editing process in feature for The Atlantic. The image above contains the original handwritten text. She then made these edits:

1. The two dogs and two cats, as well as the mice, were part of my real situation, but I probably felt that they lessened the ominousness of the story, and certainly that the lack of “acknowledgement” of the mice was chatty and distracting.

2. The addition of “where they cowered in” a...