Words, Words, Words

Many words have been devoted to the art and craft of writing, and many of those many words give the same advice:

Strunk and White: “Omit needless words.”

George Orwell: “Never use a long word where a short one will do…. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”

Elmore Leonard: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.”

Esther Freud: “Cut until you can cut no more.”

V. S. Naipaul: “Do not write long sentences. A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.”

Laura Miller: “Cut the scenery.”

But how does the budding writer learn to discern where the scenery ends and the important material begins? A recent article in the Wall Street Journal offers a suggestion. David Droga, the chairman of the advertising agency Droga5, argues that those who want to become great writers should cut their teeth on ad copy, because in advertising there is one rule: “Less really is more.”

Does the idea have legs? It’s true that some very fine writers, including Joseph Heller, Dorothy L. Sayers, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, and Richard Yates, have advertising copywriting in their pasts, but it seems just as likely that they were good copywriters (if they were) because they were good writers, not the other way around. Even though Sayers wrote a whole mystery, “Murder Must Advertise” (which, incidentally, is a delightful summer read if you’re looking for one), about the ad business, the only common element between her famous Guinness campaign—

[#image: /photos/590953cd2179605b11ad3b48]

—and her many novels, plays, essays, and translations is evidence of a good ear.

As for cutting in general, people who are brilliant can safely ignore this advice. To wit: would George Eliot have written this spectacular, and justly famous, forty-one-word sentence if Elmore and V.S. had got hold of her?

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

It’s perfect—every word is exactly as it should be. If you don’t agree, consider this cut version I found while looking up the original quotation—I’m assuming poor memory or terrible hurry or both is responsible for it: “If we could hear the squirrel’s heartbeat, the sound of the grass growing, we should die of that roar.” Oddly enough, the missing piece is perhaps the best description of the one thing that every great writer really does need: a keen vision and feeling of ordinary human life.

Somewhere, George and Dorothy are having a Guinness in companionable silence, while the rest of us try to figure out what to cut.