Jerry Seinfeld described the two personas we need to inhabit to be good writers.
The key to writing, to being a good writer, is to treat yourself like a baby, [to be] nurturing and loving, and then switch over to Lou Gossett in Officer and a Gentleman. and just be a harsh [expletive], a ball-busting son of a…When you’re writing, you want to treat your brain like a toddler. It’s just all nurturing and loving and supportiveness. And then when you look at it the next day, you want to be just a hard-ass. And you switch back and forth.
I love it: a gentle nurturer, treating my brain like a toddler, and then a hard-assed drill sergeant who is relentlessly reviewing, looking critically and, most important, cutting.
Most of the time, our writing has too many words. These extra words are a place to hide, an excuse for 80%-there thinking that’s directionally correct but still fuzzy.
The false safety of extra words and high-falutin language is how we avoid laying our ideas bare.
When we cut, our ideas stand naked and exposed to the world. They can be seen clearly, unadorned. The unadorned is bare, but it is also beautiful.
It’s an act of courage to cut away all the unnecessary bits, to stop burying our best thinking in extra blather.
We cut, we cut, we add a bit, and then we cut some more.
On and on until one of two things happens: either we learn that this idea isn’t good enough, or we discover the distilled essence of what we want to say.
Cutting is an act of confidence and bravery. When in doubt, cut.
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