I recently read an interesting book about minimalism called Goodbye, Things.
It made me look at my life, more specifically my home office and closet, and realize “There’s a lot of crap around here.” Whether it’s shirts I haven’t worn in years, books I won’t re-read or coffee mugs I forgot I had, unnecessary things flood my life.
The result was a garbage bag full of stuff and a trip to Goodwill.
Looking around my room or walking around a dollar store, there is so much that serves no purpose – other than taking up space and adding to the world’s garbage problem.
The same is true about writing.
Word Garbage
There is a lot of unnecessary crap in bad writing.
A word here and there. A sentence that serves no purpose. A detour paragraph.
Whatever it is, it makes a reader’s life more difficult. There is no malice of forethought, of course, for this kind of writing. Most of the time, it’s because the writer looks for typos in the editing process.
While grabbing a net to catch those typos is great, make sure to grab your blade too.
Be Like the Roach in Family Guy
Don’t think about clutter when you’re writing your first draft. It’ll only paralyze you. Just write. Writing is hard enough as it is, so focus on laboring through the first draft.
When you’re done and it’s time to edit, though, take that blade and actively look at what you can cut. Go word by word. Can I say this in fewer words? Is that “that” that important?
So you hatcheted your way through the jungle of your first draft. You were taking out words and whole sentences like you were John Rambo.
Great!
Now do it again.
There’s a scene in Family Guy when Brian is at a sleazy hotel and the manager makes a reference to some bad roaches. Enter the bathroom and there’s two gigantic roaches with knives.
“I’m going to cut you so bad, man,” one of the roaches said. “I’m going to cut you so bad, that you’re going to wish I didn’t cut you up so bad.”
Be like that roach.
It is difficult at first to, as they say, kill your darlings. But eventually it gets addicting. You can’t wait to trim and slice and slash – writers tend to have addictive personalities, after all.
Finding the Sweet Spot
A tricky part in the cutting process is to not overdo it. You don’t want to cut your writing down to bare bones.
See Jesse cut. Cut, Jesse, cut.
Find the sweet spot between keeping your voice and trimming the fat. But like everything else in the world, that will come with time and practice.
Hold Yourself to the Same Standard
We know what it feels like to read or listen to somebody tell a long story.
They go off on tangents, telling irrelevant asides.
“…and she’s dating Tony, who I went to junior high with his brother, who was really nice. His name was Christopher. I don’t know what happened to Christopher. Last I heard he went into the Navy or Army. Or was it the Air Force? He went into some military I think, and when we were in eighth grade, he–”
“Oh my God, will you PLEASE get to the point!”
We know how frustrating an unstructured story can be. Hold yourself to the same standard when you write. Stay focused and leave out anything that doesn’t push the story forward.
Death to Word Counts
There are two things writers love more than anything:
- Word counts
- Finding an excuse to do anything other than write
Word counts are a recipe for bad writing if you focus on the low-end number– we’ve all done term papers padded with more artificial filler than Hollywood celebrities. How long does it need to be? How can I write it if I don’t know the minimum requirement for length?
The problem is when the word count is 500, we can say the same in 300.
But the word count is 500! We need to get to 500!
So what do we do? We add pointless crap. A few unnecessary words sprinkled in. A sentence that doesn’t say anything new. A useless paragraph that pads that word count.
What we should be doing, though, is loading those 200 unnecessary words into a garbage bag and throwing them away.
copyhound 