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Tim Tian

Writing by subtraction

· Essays · writing, process

The first draft of anything I write is too long. Not slightly too long — reliably, embarrassingly too long, the way a first attempt at a mechanism has twice the parts it needs. For years I treated this as a flaw to fix at the source. Write tighter! It never worked, and I have come to believe it cannot work: drafting and cutting are different activities, and trying to do both at once does both badly.

So now I write the way I refactor. The draft is allowed to sprawl, because the draft is not the product. The product appears afterward, in an editing pass whose only move is deletion. No rephrasing, no rearranging — those are separate passes. The deletion pass asks one question of every sentence: what breaks if this goes? If the answer is nothing, it goes. It is astonishing how often the answer is nothing.

The best statement of the principle is a century old, from Strunk's little book:

Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Note what he does not say. He does not say make everything short. A machine has exactly the parts it needs — sometimes that is three, sometimes three hundred. The crime is not length; it is parts that do no work.

The mechanics

In practice the deletion pass looks for three kinds of dead weight:

  • Hedges. "I think", "sort of", "in some sense". If the sentence is wrong, hedging does not make it less wrong; it makes it wrong and limp.
  • Throat-clearing. Any sentence whose job is to announce the next sentence. The reader is already here. Start.
  • Duplicates. The same claim, restated with different furniture. Keep whichever version is sharpest and delete the rest, the same way you would collapse two functions that differ only in variable names.

The programming analogy is not decoration; it is genuinely how I hold the discipline in my head. When I review my own code, deleting a line feels like winning — git diff --stat with a minus sign is the best feeling in the trade. The same instinct transfers. An essay is a diff against silence, and silence was pretty good.

// The editing loop, expressed in the language I write more of than English.
public String edit(String draft) {
    String previous;
    do {
        previous = draft;
        draft = deleteNeedlessWords(draft);
    } while (!draft.equals(previous)); // stop when nothing left to cut
    return draft;
}

The loop terminates, which is more than can be said for most advice about writing. When deleteNeedlessWords finds nothing to remove, you are done — not because the piece is perfect, but because further effort belongs to a different pass.

This site is built on the same bet. There is a well-known manifesto about web design whose entire argument is that the default page — text, links, nothing else — was already close to right, and that most of what we add subtracts. I find it hard to disagree in prose and harder in HTML. Delete until it breaks, then put the last thing back.

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