There are two kinds of people: Keepers and Throwers. I’m a Keeper. I can’t throw anything away.
This epiphany came while editing a recent story that my editor had called, “unwieldy,” a polite way of saying, “Get to the bloody point.” His version of the piece was five-hundred words. My original was nearly two-thousand. His was better, I knew, but at what cost? I was heartbroken. Where were all the little side-musings, the digressions? What happened to the eager Chinese man who loved football? “You can’t just cut the Chinese guy,” I wrote in an email.
My editor liked my wit, but felt I was hindering my story with irrelevancies. I went to task, cutting into the piece, wincing with each sentence’s deletion. Why was this so hard for me? They’re just sentences. It reminded me of spring cleaning and I suddenly thought about how maybe it wasn’t only my stories that I was hindering.
Please read the rest at TheNervousBreakdown.com
loading...
Related posts:
It appears that the latest and greatest of iPhones is seriously flawed. ”Woah, buddy, get the fuck off me, alright?” many new iPhones were reported to say to users if they were held too closely. If a user wrapped their hand around the phone while using it, iPhone would just freeze up. One advanced user [...]
With the discovery of over a trillion dollars worth of lithium under its soil, Afghanistan has announced today that it will be moving its entire population to Miami Beach, Florida. The move comes as a surprise to many who believe the Afghanis naturally prefer their desert homeland. In an announcement today, President Karzai said, “Are [...]
Reports have been coming in that, since the discovery of massive lithium deposits in the more troubled regions of Afghanistan, the entire Middle-East seems to have stabilized. Said one veteran war reporter, “I can’t really describe it. First, nothing happened. Everyone was still fighting. Everywhere, people were still shouting and yelling and burning things. Then, [...]