WRITE SHORT
by Kelly Ryan Harriger
The importance of brevity and conciseness in writing for publication.
Few issues are more vital to having your work published than presenting editors with clean, concise and to-the-point writing. As any editor will tell you, almost any piece of work can be made better by getting to the point as quickly and cleanly as possible. This typically means lowering the word count and being more precise with your word choices.
To that end, we offer the following points:
1. Choose your words carefully. If a word creates ambiguity, replace it. If it’s a complex word that wasn’t used for a very specific reason, replace it with a simpler word.
2. Avoid redundancy. Read over your piece, and look for words, phrasing, and passages that say the same thing, and then remove them.
3. Become a ruthless editor of your own work. Does a phrase, sentence or paragraph move the story? If it doesn’t, remove it, even if you’re attached to it. As Faulkner said about writing well, “Murder your darlings.”
4. Avoid intentional “wordsmithing.” If your writing flows naturally, with good word choices, it’ll get the job done. When you force your style, or attempt something you haven’t mastered, it becomes unnatural and sounds awkward. Know your voice and your limits and trust them to get the job done.
5. Not everything you write will be great. Accept this fact. Treat 60%-80% of your writing as practice. Musicians, athletes, artists and others all know the value of working at something over and over again to get better. Just because you put passion and time into a piece is no guarantee that it will be good. Learn to recognize when you write well, and then trim out the stuff you know isn’t up to snuff. Leaving things out can sometimes be more valuable to the finished piece than what you leave in. Trim the fat and fluff. Become your best editor.
6. Striving for brevity and conciseness takes practice. Make yourself practice often. Look at previous work where you stopped because it wasn’t going well. Now edit it down, making everything more concise. Often, if a piece isn’t going anywhere, this simple practice will expose why it’s not working.
7. Always know where you’re going when you start to write. While it’s often fun to explore and let things unfold, you’ll write more smoothly and efficiently if you know where you’re going with a poem, essay or short story. If your destination is in sight from the beginning, getting to the end will take much less effort.
8. William Goldman, considered one of the world’s all-time best screenwriters and storytellers (The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, and countless others), offered one of the most succinct pieces of advice for writers. He advised writers to always come into your scenes at the last possible moment. It’s brilliant advice and eliminates unnecessary exposition and setup (which will keep things short and concise).
These eight tips, applied to your writing, will help you turn long, cumbersome passages into short, concise, to-the-point writing, as well as help your piece catch the eye of editors who not only have to choose writing for its content, but also for space requirements.
