Reduce, reuse, recycle
Three rules to minimize waste in your writing
Goooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you might happen to be!
This week’s post is about a firm belief I have about Being A Writer. And that belief is this: writers never throw anything away.
I don’t mean that writers are hoarders (not even that they’re word-hoarders, though the Old English term wordhord referred to the words or phrases a poet might draw on in his or her work). I mean that good writers seek to avoid waste wherever possible.
So what does that mean in practice?
Reduce
Though purple prose can be entertaining, most of the best writing out there is economical. It doesn’t waste words, space on the page, or the reader’s time. One of the reasons Hemingway’s style is so distinctive is that it’s so direct, so boiled-down-to-the-bone (which is why there’s that famous apocryphal story about him being challenged to write a 6-word short story: ‘For sale: baby shoes. Never worn’.).
This applies to academic writing, too, folks. Whether you’re writing a term paper or a book chapter, you never want to feel like you’re just coming up with ways to fill the space you have to fill. Instead, you want to feel like you’re zeroing in on your argument and avoiding detours down irrelevant rabbit holes. Whenever I’m writing a grant application, I know I’m getting close to the final version if I’m really struggling to fit everything into my word/character limit.
So trim the fat! See if there’s a more efficient, economical way to say what you want to say. Write ‘how’ instead of ‘the ways in which’. But—and this is key to my next point—don’t throw anything away.
Reuse
When you’re whittling down a piece of writing, it’s tempting to just hit delete and wave goodbye to inessential words forever. But don’t do it.
Instead, highlight whatever it is you want to cut, hit Ctrl + X (i.e. ‘cut’), and then paste that sucker into a totally separate document labelled something like ‘[title of your piece] SCRAPS’ (I label mine ‘[title of my piece] FRAGMENTS’).
You never know when you might need to refer to something you deleted from a document. You might even want to use it to create a totally new document! Or you might decide you want to keep a particular footnote but not the sentence that goes with it. Or you might want to revise a paragraph but keep the original version of the paragraph somewhere. The point is, never throw anything away in case you want to reuse it.
Recycle
Got a piece of work-in-progress that just doesn’t quite feel like it’s ‘there’ yet? Why not try repurposing it for a new format, genre, or audience? Nobody wants to be the writer who just keeps using the same tropes/storylines/arguments/evidence over and over again. But sometimes recycling your writing in one way or another can help you to understand it better, which can help you to make it better.
‘Recycling’ writing can take different forms depending on whether you’re talking about academic writing or creative writing. In creative writing, recycling writing might mean taking a particular scene or motif or character and putting it into very different pieces of writing to see how it evolves. In academia, it can mean giving slightly different versions of the same conference paper over and over until you figure out what you want to do with it. I feel like I gave different versions of one conference paper for over a year, starting with a 5-minute talk (!) and working my way up to a 55-minute lecture until I was finally able to transform it into this article (one of my best, IMHO!). Note: If you do this, audiences really appreciate it when you acknowledge that this is a different version of a paper you’ve given elsewhere, especially if there’s anyone in the audience who might have heard an earlier version.
It’s not the sexiest writing tip out there, but bringing a reduce-reuse-recycle mindset to your writing can not only make you a better writer, but can also reassure you that you’re not wasting your time, energy, and ideas when you write.
As ever, thanks for reading. This is a reader-supported publication, and the best way to support it is to become a paid subscriber (either at $6 per month or $60 per year).
If you’re really feeling generous, and you’d like access to everything above and regular feedback on your own writing whenever you need it, you can become a Founding Member ($150).
VB,
M