Sometimes limitations make things better

For most of the time I was working on All the Birds in the Sky, it was WAY too long. Like, ridiculously long. It was going to be like a George R.R. Martin book, only with less descriptions of food. It makes sense – trying to have a whole story about these characters as kids, followed by a whole story about them as adults, was a lot to pack in.

Some stuff was super easy to cut, like there were sections that clearly needed to go. And some of it was just trimming the extra junk here and there, which adds up. But also, I had to get creative. And in some cases, that turned out to be kinda fun.

Like, in the middle of the book, I had a long-ass section where Laurence, one of the two main characters, is thinking about how frustrating people are. Why are people so confusing? Why can’t people just say what they mean? What’s the point of even trying to talk to people? Maybe one day we’ll have the Singularity and everyone will get uploaded and become cybernetic gods, and then we can actually have an honest conversation. Etc. etc. Anyway, this long section was just kind of a lot of hot air, and when I stared at it for a few hours, I realized I could cut it down to just:

One day the Singularity would elevate humans to cybernetic superbeings, and maybe then people would say what they meant.
Probably not, though.

And those two sentences said everything I was trying to say with this three-page internal monologue, except they were just two sentences. So sometimes having a hard limit actually makes you work harder. And that can be kind of a good thing.

Top image: The Future of the Mind by Michio Kaku