On leaving stuff out, or some writing advice for myself

...and for everyone else, too, if they want it

Searching for “scissors” on Wikimedia turns up some pretty unsettling results. This one was the least aggressive. Larousse encyclopedia.

I’m not going to lie, I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed this week with all things writing. In addition to working on my book and this newsletter, I’m editing someone else’s big ole chapters, a weekly newsletter for a news organization, and juggling a myriad other writing and translating assignments. (I’m also despairing a bit about freelance pitching which feels like shouting into some void of editor inboxes. But amidst the overwhelm this week, I’m telling myself that the void is actually blessing.) It all gets to be…a bit much.

I thought I’d write out some writing advice for myself as a reprieve. I find reading advice soothing; I can’t even tell you how many — often bad! — Substacks with “X things I do to …” I’d saved to look through in the bath.

I set out to have this post be a list of somewhat disparate tips, but they all ended up focused on one particular aspect of writing: leaving shit out. Not to psychoanalyze myself but there’s a clear reason for this fixation: I’ve been working on two giant projects, one of which is my book chapter that covers something like 200 years of courtship history. Culling, cutting, and curating for both of these pieces of writing has been by far the hardest part of the process, leaving me absolutely drained from decision fatigue.

But that’s the work! And there’s a framework for thinking about it. So, without further ado, a manifesto I should at least print out and possibly tattoo on myself so I remember to keep coming back to it in moments of writerly overwhelm:

Let the writing breathe. I think a lot of us nonfiction writers, and certainly myself, have a tendency to try to put ALL OF IT IN THERE. The bigger the topic (cough, the history of online dating), the worse the tendency is. It’s a combination of a panic that you’ll miss something important and won’t paint the full picture, with the general need to impress the reader with all the research and work you’ve done. Get over yourself (I’m not trying to be rude to anyone except myself, but if you take these little messages for your own practice, welcome!).

Which brings me to a related mantra that I need to remember: (Most) readers won’t know what you didn’t write. Of course you’re going to miss things. Some people may get mad, but most people won’t know or care. (I know I heard or read this somewhere, but for the life of me I can’t remember or find it — I suspect it was a wise historian on episode of the podcast Drafting The Past.)

John McPhee writes an entire piece on the art of the omission for his New Yorker series on writing that was later compiled into the book Draft No.4. He writes:

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out.

The problem for me is with his next sentence: “At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out.” I’m a goddamn nerd, and I’m interested in all of it!!! That’s probably the time to take a breath and let your writing do the same. Or take into consideration advice from another writer, which seems a bit conflicting on the surface.

Lee Guttkind talks in his book You Can’t Make This Stuff Up about a trick he calls “reading over your reader’s shoulder.” Thankfully, this reader is a proverbial one because actually reading over someone’s shoulder is a sin worst than most (except when snooping on strangers texting on the subway, that’s just fun). “Read what you’ve written from your readers’ perspective. Decide if it works for them — not you,” he writes. I think that’s a very smart, if obvious, lesson that is also very hard to learn.

McPhee, I think, actually agrees with this because he devotes a large part of that essay on omission to admitting that the editor of his longform piece on… oranges (as in, the fruit) was right to cut out large chunks of it (although I find his struggles hard to relate to since in the same breath he speaks of a 55,000-word story of his that ran over three issues of The New Yorker). He also often speaks of letting the reader run free, and well, getting over yourself:

To cause a reader to see in her mind’s eye an entire autumnal landscape, for example, a writer needs to deliver only a few words and images—such as corn shocks, pheasants, and an early frost. The creative writer leaves white space between chapters or segments of chapters. The creative reader silently articulates the unwritten thought that is present in the white space. Let the reader have the experience. Leave judgment in the eye of the beholder. When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author. If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost. Give elbow room to the creative reader. In other words, to the extent that this is all about you, leave that out.

I also keep coming back to this quote from McPhee, this time from a Paris Review interview (this is literally the only time I’ve found AI tools useful for research— I couldn’t remember where he said it and after unsuccessfully reading through my copy of Draft No. 4 and fruitlessly googling, I asked the search engine Perplexity, and we got there):

INTERVIEWER: How do you approach transitions between these various sections?

MCPHEE: You look for good juxtapositions. If you’ve got good juxtapositions, you don’t have to worry about what I regard as idiotic things, like a composed transition. If your structure really makes sense, you can make some jumps and your reader is going to go right with you. You don’t need to build all these bridges and ropes between the two parts.

Balancing what to say and what to let the reader glean is extremely tricky. In that giant chapter of my book I mentioned above, I veered hard into the latter, leaving a lot unsaid, the reader facing some abysses they just wouldn’t be able to jump over. My writing group buddies said they were lost, contextless in those couple of pages. I wanted to show and not tell, and plop the reader right in the midst of it all, as the creative writing wisdom goes, and I strayed a bit too far.

When you (I) have strayed, it may be time to recall how Ira Glass talks about the structure of a satisfying broadcast story (I did not recall this myself, I was reading through a delightful craft book that is technically meant for academic writers but works for everyone called Every Day I Write The Book by Amitava Kumar). Glass says that there are just two basic building blocks that you need to keep the listener hooked (but honestly, the reader, too): the anecdote and the reflection.

And in a good story you’re gonna flip back and forth between the two. Like there’ll be a little bit of action and someone will say something about it, there’ll be a little bit of action and someone will say something.

And that’s really a lot of the trick of the whole thing is to have the perseverance that if you’ve got an interesting anecdote that you’ve also got an interesting moment of reflection that will support it. And then the two together, interwoven, will make something larger than the sum of the parts.

In other words, after you spin that yarn, you gotta bring it back and focus up. It can be just that simple.