Write Tight

"Murder your darlings." - Arthur Quiller-Couch

I strive to be a taker-outer instead of a putter-inner. This is partly due to my impatience with other writers' overlong prose. Mostly it's thanks to an adjunct professor named Green, whose summer course I took in 1988 at San Francisco State.

On Day One, he announced that each of our six writing assignments would require just one page. The room of beleaguered creative writing and English majors echoed with applause. Mr. Green grinned as he cautioned: we might thank him when our assignment was to analyze a Robert Frost 14-line poem, but by the final week, exploring a play by Tom Stoppard, we'd beg for release from the constraint.

Mr. Green, with his pastel suits and bright bow ties and rigid edict, is tattooed on my brain like a superhero on my forearm. That first assignment - "Design" - was a breeze. It took me half an hour and earned my only A. Next week we read John Cheever's short story "The Swimmer," and then an essay by humorist James Thurber. Each reading was longer than the last.

While Mr. Green allowed us to widen margins, shrink font size to ten, and single-space, I was determined to keep that gap between lines all summer as a point of pride. By my fifth paper (on a novel), or possibly my fourth (on a short novella), I'd had to cave to single-spacing. By the time I tackled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, I spent several hours compressing that goddamned essay to a 10-point arial, .25-margined triumph on a tiny 8-1/2 x 11-inch page.

It was like packing for my next summer of backpacking across Europe: seven t-shirts to three; five pair of shoes to two; one skirt, one pair of pants, one pair of shorts, and the misguided hope that feminine hygiene products would be available in Budapest one short year after Perestroika.

I've struggled to apply Green's lessons of 29 years ago to every piece of writing since, but oh, how I love my adjectives, how I cherish my adverbs! I grip them the way I grip my steering wheel in traffic, only letting go when I notice how much my fingers hurt.

Now I'm reading Roy Peter Clark's How to Write Short, from where the assignment to explore being a putter-inner vs. taker-outer came. When I'm struggling to butcher a blog post, I remind myself how disinclined I am to read someone else's paragraph if it's longer than five lines. Then I gulp, give up one or two intensifiers, and bravely soldier on.

And just before I click "Publish Post," I wonder if anyone other than my mother is willing to slog through to the last punctuation mark.