As you may noticed somewhere between yesterday’s status of 964 words or my innumerable statuses which require the ‘continue reading’ link, brevity is not my strong point. Obviously this makes Twitter a nightmare, but luckily Facebook recently extended their character limit to allow people like me to write novellas. My inability to better summarise my points has posed a severe problem to my Masters degree however. For example, my last assignment was set at 5000 words, which is already a substantial amount, but my first draft came to 18 000. I guess I just feel I have so much I want to say and the idea of cutting any of it out is horrific. But every writing guide I have ever read always stresses the value of conciseness, and I must agree. So in an attempt to write more tersely I have been reading a collection of short stories from Ernest Hemingway, who is generally considered the master of short simple prose. The preface has this cool passage which I thought worth sharing, both for its wisdom and as an example of his control of language. x “In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, youll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.”
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 10:07:31 +0000
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