Words to Write By
“Brevity is achieved by selection rather than compression.”
-- Donald M. Murray
The value of this quote — and its prescription for revision — became evident the other day when I got a “good news-bad news” e-mail from an editor.
The good news: “We would like to use your piece.”
The bad: “…but in a trimmed version.”
To fit the format of the department where the story was going to run, my 2,000-word essay needed to go on a diet — to “roughly 1,400 words.”
“I'm happy to try to condense the piece,” the editor offered, “but if you'd rather send me a trimmed version, that's fine too.”
I appreciated the offer and I confess my first reaction was to abdicate and let the editor wield the knife. But that impulse quickly passed. If anyone was going to cut my story, it was going to be me, as painful as I knew it was going to be.
Normally, I’d start by hunting down widows. Removing those lonely words dangling at the end of a paragraph are the quickest way to save a line here or there — and preserve my deathless prose..
But widows wouldn’t do the job of this cut — roughly one-third of the story. My story needed major surgery — a course of action that brought to mind Don Murray’s dictum about selection versus compression.
“The trick in the short article is to select the essential part of the story and then to develop it fully,” Murray writes in Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work, a handbook based on his work coaching writers and editors at The Boston Globe, Providence Journal and other newspapers.
“Most writers, when ordered to write short, make the mistake of writing the garbage compactor story, compressing everything that is in the notebook into a hard, indigestible pellet of news,” he says.
The key then wasn’t trying to squeeze into the piece the ideas, facts and details I’d collected but to make informed choices — what belonged, what could go. Instead of widows, I’d have to eliminate entire families of prose. I began by looking for entire sections I could cut and quickly found one — a four-paragraph passage of background.
Whatever the length, Murray teaches, an effective story has a single dominant meaning, aka a theme, or “focus” in newspeak. Everything in the story must support that theme or die by the wayside. While the history was interesting, it wasn’t essential. Before I hit the delete button, I did a word count: 280 words. Out it went.
I located another target: a three-paragraph anecdote. A useful illustration but not crucial. Another 199 words gone.
I was surprised how easy and painless it was. Just two taps of the delete key and I’d reached nearly 70 percent of my goal.
I narrowed my search. Single paragraphs: 63 words; Sentences: 55 words; Dependent clauses: 16 words.
In less than an hour, I was 87 words from my goal. Only then did I start going after the usual suspects: phrases, adjectives, adverbs, single words. Paradoxically, I found it more difficult.
And later that day, three hours after my editor’s e-mail arrived, I sent him a downsized version: 1,420 words. Close enough.
I learned two things from this process: It’s easier to whack an entire paragraph than a single word. And there isn’t a piece of writing that can’t benefit from vigorous use of the delete key.
