Be Grateful for What You Can Throw Away

But don't throw anything away

George Goodwin Kilburne The Answer

In days of yore, when the world was young, I taped two mottos to my typewriter. (That’s right, you read correctly. I wrote “typewriter.” See above, under “days of yore.”)

If memory serves, the first of these phrases lapidaires, came from the Meisterwerk of William Zinsser, On Writing Well. (That’s right. I put an expression borrowed from French in the same sentence as a word taken from German. Welcome to Extra Muros, home of supply-side linguistics.) It read “be grateful for what you can throw away.”

In coining this proverb, the indispensable Mr. Zinsser wished to remind writers that readers care little for the toil and trouble expended in the crafting of a paragraph, and less for the love between artist and artifact that grows in proportion to the pains that were taken in the process of creation.

The reader wants his information, clearly labeled, properly packaged, and delivered in a timely manner. Thus, as hard as it might be, the writer must excise, with a degree of ruthlessness worthy of Samuel Johnson, any bit of wordery, however clever, erudite, or whimsical it might be, that complicates this act of consignment.¹

Excision, however, should not be confused with damnatio memoriae. Thus, rather than casting the redundant bits of text into the outer darkness of my wastepaper basket, I resolved to hold on to them, in the hope that, at some point in the future, I might put them to good use. To remind myself to do this, I provided my first motto with a helpmate, which read “But don’t throw anything away.”

In the forty-four years that followed my adoption of these adages, I trimmed much from pieces I submitted to the tender mercies of my editors, and, in the course of doing so, accumulated much in the way of half-finished articles, chapter-fragments, and stray paragraphs. Indeed, while my other blog on this platform has provided a home for many of these bits of literary flotsam and jetsam, my attempts to fill the pages of Extra Muros with things worth reading has resulted in a collection of sixty or so of what the Substack author’s interface is kind enough to call “drafts.”

How many of these clumps of starter dough will result in something oven-worthy is anyone’s guess. Still, I keep them around, whether as a means of sparking ideas or a place to keep promising turns of phrase. Indeed, I find such paths not properly taken so useful that, when one of my favorite writers confessed to deleting some of his unfinished beginnings, the thought of the loss of so many insights, however half-baked they might be, caused me palpable distress.

So, Gentle Reader, if you wish to write well, you must heed the advice of Messrs. Johnson and Zinsser. Sharpen your paring knife, and wield it without ruth. At the same time, get yourself a high-capacity hard-drive, and fill it with the bits and pieces that fall to the floor as you edit. The knowledge that the well-wrought sentence that failed to fit may find a better home at some point in the future will comfort you and, in doing so, make it easier to tackle the hardest of all of a writer’s many chores.

1. Marvelous to say, the oft-quoted advice of Dr. Johnson (“… where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out”) was itself a quotation from someone else. James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (London: Caddell and Davies, 1811) Volume 2, page 354.