Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress.. Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind! . Nick Hornby
About This Quote

Spoil yourself, young writers! Readers won't mind. This is another quote from William Shatner. The idea of this quote is that most people will know what the writer meant by the word 'spoil' and most people will like the writer even if they do not agree with their choices. This is one of those quotes that show you know what you're talking about and that the readers don't really care what you think as long as they think it is funny and that they like it. You can take this as a compliment or as a criticism depending on your point of view, but at least it's a compliment in my eyes.

Source: The Polysyllabic Spree

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  1. It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.
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  3. Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.
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