Many words have been devoted to the art and craft of writing, and many of those many words give the same advice:
Strunk and White: “Omit needless words.”
George Orwell: “Never use a long word where a short one will do…. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”
Elmore Leonard: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.”
Esther Freud: “Cut until you can cut no more.”
V. S. Naipaul: “Do not write long sentences. A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.”
Laura Miller: “Cut the scenery.”
But how does the budding writer learn to discern where the scenery ends and the important material begins? A recent article in the Wall Street Journal offers a suggestion. David Droga, the chairman of the advertising agency Droga5,
—and her many novels, plays, essays, and translations is evidence of a good ear.
As for cutting in general, people who are brilliant can safely ignore this advice. To wit: would cut version I found while looking up the original quotation—I’m assuming poor memory or terrible hurry or both is responsible for it: “If we could hear the squirrel’s heartbeat, the sound of the grass growing, we should die of that roar.” Oddly enough, the missing piece is perhaps the best description of the one thing that every great writer really does need: a keen vision and feeling of ordinary human life.
Somewhere, George and Dorothy are having a Guinness in companionable silence, while the rest of us try to figure out what to cut.
via newyorker.com