Shorter is Harder

I’ve been working on the Structure unit for over on the writing blog, and I’m finding it difficult to keep to my 500 word limit. I’m not a stickler about it; if I hit 550, that’s fine, but I’m getting close to a thousand words on some of those entries and that’s just too many for an intro. All of this has just reminded me that shorter is harder.

I think that’s the reason so much writing, fiction and non-fiction, goes off the rails. We put in everything we want to without thinking about what the reader needs and wants, which usually is not our every single thought. I’ve been working on an Arrow essay because what’s happening with that show is really interesting from a writer’s point of view, but I’ve rewritten it [an Arrow essay] three times because it’s about what I want to write about, not about what most of you want to read. I’ve broken it down into sub-topics, and I keep retitling them, moving them closer to reader-based titles instead of the here’s-what-I’m-obsessing-on topics. It’s still about what I’m obsessing on, but focusing it on a writer approach instead of a fan approach is making it leaner and clearer because I’m cutting a lot of examples that just repeated what I’d already said. “That was fun to write” is not a rationale for keeping something in the essay. It’s a rationale for writing it into the first draft, but then in the next draft, shorter is better and I go back to “What is useful and interesting?” instead.

God knows that’s true in fiction, too. My classic example is the thirty-two pages of discussion of art deco china in the first draft of Fast Women. I think it’s about a page and a half in the final book, and that’s probably more than I needed. That first scene in Faking It should never have been there, but I had such a good time writing it. “This was fun to write and it’ll [“That’ll] be fun to read” is not a good reason to leave something in your story because it rarely is fun to read; the reader will try to make it fit with the story, and if it’s just general Stuff and not Story, she or he is going to frustrated and bored, looking for the real story.

And sometimes even real story needs to be cut if you can do the same thing in a sentence or just let the reader assume something has happened. That’s especially true if the thing has happened before, especially if it’s happened more than once. It can’t just be part of the story, it has to move the story. It’s the same in non-fiction: it can’t just be another example, it has to be another example that sheds new light. Non-fiction has to move just like fiction, the reader has to feel as though she’s getting somewhere.

So I’m still cutting the essay on how the writers fixed Arrow. And the one on The Girl in the Twenty-First Century. And the structure posts. And the book I’m working on. They all need pruned because shorter is better. I’d cut this entry, too, but I need to get something up here before everybody thinks I died.

Wait, let me go back through it one more time . . .

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