Increase Pressure Through Compression

Slack is common in early drafts: words, images, and beats are present but not working, so that the reader’s attention is spent carrying them.

In the spring of 1980 Raymond Carver gave his editor, Gordon Lish, then at Knopf, a manuscript of seventeen stories. The Library of America’s account of the text records that Lish edited the manuscript in two rounds and that the overall word count fell by 55 percent. One story, “A Small, Good Thing,” went from thirty-seven pages to twelve and became “The Bath.” Reading the edited version, Carver wrote an anguished letter at eight in the morning of July 8, asking Lish to stop production of the book. He acknowledged in it that Lish had made many of the stories much better. On July 10 he wrote again, saying he was thrilled with the book yet feared “making them too thin.” Production went ahead, and the book appeared as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), was praised, and was credited with popularizing a minimalist style. In 2009 the Library of America published Carver’s original manuscript, under the title Beginners, so that readers could compare.

The edited stories do a great deal with little. They also belong to someone who did not choose the cuts, and the comparison can come out either way. Carver’s fear names the opposite hazard, thinning mistaken for compression. Compression keeps what is necessary and makes each remaining element carry more. Thinning removes the necessary along with the surplus, and the reader senses the gap without being able to fill it. Brevity by itself earns nothing either; some writers draft lean while others draft long and cut.

Which one you get comes down to the reader’s own labor. When something is left out and the reader can reconstruct it, the reconstruction gives the sentence force, probably because the reader has made it part of their own experience. When the reader cannot reconstruct it, the effect is confusion or coldness.

Lydia Davis has written pieces of a single sentence, and the title story of her collection Samuel Johnson Is Indignant is one. The title carries the subject and the verb, and the body of the story is the clause that completes it, a grievance about how few trees Scotland has.

Bashō’s frog poem, which Practice 10 reads for what it notices, is three phrases of five, seven, and five sounds. Lafcadio Hearn, writing in 1898, rendered it “Old pond—frogs jumping in—sound of water.” Japanese nouns are not normally marked for number, so translators must decide how many frogs jump, and the question is a measure of how much the grammar leaves to the reader. A cutting word, ya, after “pond” separates the still thing from the event, and the reader supplies the silence on either side of the splash.

Practice. Take a passage of about 300 words and ninety minutes. Before cutting, write one sentence naming the effect it should have on the reader: what they should feel, know, or expect afterward. Save the original under a new name. Cut in three passes, first removing sentences that repeat something already given, then modifiers the reader can infer, then combining what remains. After each pass, read the result aloud to someone, or to yourself the next day, and check whether the effect holds. When it begins to slip, stop and restore the last cut. Put the two versions side by side and list what was removed and what now carries it.