‘Eliminate Every Superfluous Word’
The article seems like a caricature of itself, but to the sentiment of the title: the devil’s in the details.<p>I think people tend to imagine Hemingway as spare prose and pithy sentences, and when they try to mimic their stereotype of him, they end up with dry prose and dead sentences. Real Hemingway had range, often wrote long, descriptive sentences. And here we find the devil:<p>The trick isn’t wringing your prose down to a clear, factual account. The trick is knowing in the first place what is “necessary” to convey the truth of whatever writing.<p>“What literally occurred” is only one possible angle on this, and focus on that is neither necessary nor sufficient to create artful prose. Depending on the piece you may focus on what occurred, the feeling and mood of it, the reader’s relationship to any of it, or the questions any of the above evokes—-if the question is “what might this prose be _for_, at its heart?” then the list of answers is endless. And so the answer to the question “which words are necessary?” is “any of them might be, depending on what you intend to convey and to whom.”<p>So yes, eliminate every superfluous word, fine. Also, apply only the necessary paint strokes to the canvas. This advice is not helpful for a beginner, it’s only useful to someone who has artistry to convey and enough craft to bear critique.