Cut your work by 1/3

Sorry this letter is so long. I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.
~ Mark Twain

I love this quote because it's the best of humour: funny, but also insightful and true. And what it points to, for me, is an essential truth of writing: that while it can take no time at all to bash out a story or scene, it takes ages to distill it, to find its essence, to sculpt it into its most powerful form.

Don't get me wrong: it's wonderful to let writing pour out of us, to open the tap and flood the paper with thoughts and ideas. Flow, flow! I'm all for flow. But it's important not to mistake that full-faucet creation for something even approximating a finished product. All we've done, at that point, is get the page wet.

We haven't started to really write yet.

A novelist friend once told me that even when she's returning to something she's written, she always aims to cut it by 1/3.

She wasn't suggesting that there is a recipe, or even that this is true all of the time, but she was proposing that tighter writing is, virtually always, better writing, and most of us tend to include (and meander...) more than we need to.

So, here's a challenge: take something you've written, something short like a scene or a chapter, and cut it by 1/3. Be strict about it. One-third of the words.

I'm willing to bet the piece will improve, in flow or shape, or simply for the sentences being crisper. But see what happens.

(Sorry this blog post is so short. I didn't have time to write a longer one.)