Jason Fried on editing well

Jason Fried says in his post The Class I’d Like To Teach:

It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version. I don’t care about the topic. I care about the editing. I care about the constant refinement and compression. I care about taking three pages and turning it one page. Then from one page into three paragraphs. Then from three paragraphs into one paragraph. And finally, from one paragraph into one perfectly distilled sentence . . . This is important because I believe editing is an essential skill that is often overlooked and under appreciated. The future belongs to the best editors.

Each step requires asking “What’s really important?” That’s the most important question you can ask yourself about anything. The class would really be about answering that very question at each step of the way. Whittling it all down until all that’s left is the point.

What Jason is really getting at is this: writing and editing well require the writer to think clearly about what she is trying to say. A scatter-brained person will never write anything worth reading.

People remember well-written stories because they are so simple (although not easy to write). The short stories of John Cheever are an example of this clarity and simplicity in writing, and I recommend this collection entitled The Stories of John Cheever.

Ernest Hemingway once said:

If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There are seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

The ability to reflect carefully upon your message and eliminate unnecessary points also happens to be critical to good design, whether it’s a dress (Jil Sander), a computer (iPhone, Mac, iPad), a software program (Mac OS X) or a house (the Schindler House in Los Angeles).

Unfortunately these days, as Jason Fried says in his post, editing is underappreciated. It takes time. Most online publications want their writers to pump out as much material as possible. It’s quantity over quality because it’s all about the number of pageviews. But such an approach compromises the quality of the writing and in the end, compromises the message.

I fear that the problem goes beyond content factories. As we become more and more distracted by email, Twitter, Facebook, and social games, we become unable to concentrate on any task at hand, least of all writing and editing.