{"id":29746,"date":"2016-02-28T01:00:30","date_gmt":"2016-02-28T06:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29746"},"modified":"2016-05-24T22:04:39","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T02:04:39","slug":"qotd-editing-is-the-best-thing-that-ever-happened-to-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/02\/28\/qotd-editing-is-the-best-thing-that-ever-happened-to-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Editing is the best thing that ever happened to writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

This will be scant, because it’s a column night and I have a big piece due Friday. The situation: 3,000 word piece due. The problem: I wrote 5,000 words. This is actually easier than only writing 2,000, despite what some may say. \u201cOh, editing it down is harder.\u201d Nonsense. Only if you treasure every word. I do not subscribe to the \u201cKill your darlings\u201d idea, though; If I love a line, might it not be a sign that it\u2019s a good one? \u201cBut your judgment is clouded.\u201d By what? Decades of experience?<\/p>\n

The essay is mostly humorous, at least by contemporary definitions. It will not be funny soon enough. Styles change, references get lost, talents sag. For some reason I was thinking about S. J. Perelman the other day. In college I thought he was the best humorous writer, period. Inventive command of the language, occasional surreal bits of wordplay, confident persona. I am afraid to reread him, and discover I don\u2019t laugh at his work anymore.<\/p>\n

Then I thought it might be a consolation to see what he was writing at my age, and decide whether he had lost it. There\u2019s a writerly endeavor, isn\u2019t it? Ah, idol of youth, how you phoned it in. But that seemed like the work of a cramped spirit with no sympathy and malice galore — in other words, like Perelman. Or so I thought after reading some biographical notes, all of which noted his prickly and severe personality, his indifference to his children. You get a sense of the man in this Paris Review interview, which is amusing as a piece of performance, but he wasn\u2019t giving an exaggerated account of himself for the purposes of entertainment. He was just that much of a pill, as my mother used to say. <\/p>\n

James Lileks, The Bleat<\/em><\/a>, 2015-01-15.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This will be scant, because it’s a column night and I have a big piece due Friday. The situation: 3,000 word piece due. The problem: I wrote 5,000 words. This is actually easier than only writing 2,000, despite what some may say. \u201cOh, editing it down is harder.\u201d Nonsense. Only if you treasure every word. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,28,41],"tags":[134],"class_list":["post-29746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-media","category-quotations","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7JM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29746"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29747,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29746\/revisions\/29747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}