I’ve been thinking a lot about brevity lately.
Some of the best things in life are small. DNA, for example. Small is generative.
Our sound bite and text message culture can create the impression that small is insignificant, that short is shallow. When an experience lacks context or detail, our brains build an environment around that experience and fill in the holes. At the risk of overstating things: when details are lacking, audience members can become co-creators by exploring the implied depths.
Last year, Smith Magazine published a book of six-word memoirs titled “Not Quite What I Was Planning”. The original inspiration was Hemingway’s (possibly apocryphal) six-word short story:
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
You don’t need a thousand words to evoke a compelling image.
They have since expanded the idea, with a new collection on “Love & Heartbreak” (promotional video) and recently ran a contest to come up with a six-word inaugural address for Barack Obama. (The contest is over. My submission would have been: “Thank you. Now, we rebuild together.”)
I can read and re-read some of these concise memoirs, and they strike me differently each time, depending on my mood, or a conversation with a friend a week ago, or something I saw yesterday.
Some describe a life-defining moment:
Just in: boyfriend’s gay. Merry Christmas.
– Seshie Harget
Or life in a series of abbreviations:
ABCs
MTV
SATs
THC
IRA
NPR.– Jancee Dunn
What an extraordinary outline of a life in twenty letters! Of course, such density is only possible with an awareness of the cultural context of those abbreviations.
Others summarize a disposition:
Wildly crooked,
unlikely to be straightened.– lê thi diem thúy
And some are ambiguous enough they could describe a moment or a disposition or a lifetime:
No thank you, I’m just looking.
– Kariann Burleson
Twittering
I’ve also started to twitter recently. (No, don’t worry — that’s not a medical condition. If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, here’s a primer.)
Yes, banal tweets vastly outnumber the epigrammatic, as in other spheres of communication and life. But if you think texting and tweeting are limited to tween preening, I’d point you to actor/writer/director Stephen Fry or New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof as counter-examples, among many others.
Figuring out how to say what you want within the 140-character limit becomes a kind of editorial game. As you type, the editing window indicates how many characters you have left. The trade-offs are as clear as they are for a poet writing in a traditional form: “If I get rid of that adjective, I can add an interjection. Or maybe a link? I’ll trim that excessive adverb, and be able to properly punctuate. Could that sentence make sense without a subject?”
After a while, you just start thinking smaller, unconsciously shifting to a more terse frame of mind.
Concise. Terse. Laconic. Pithy. Whichever appeals. That’s the trick for this month.
Questions
Are you generally attracted to small art or big art? Short songs or multi-hour operas?
What is the smallest or shortest art work that you have really enjoyed? The biggest in size or longest in time?
Some words are worth more than others. Much more. Think of some of the key turning points in your own life: did it take a thousand or ten thousand words for you to realize that your life had changed in a profound way? Or a single breath’s worth?
Exercise
1.
Take something you’ve been working on: it could be art or an email or a piece of music or a memo on some boring topic. (It might be easier to do this non-destructively, with something you can easily duplicate.)
What is essential? Is there anything that can be trimmed? What aspects must remain for it to retain its meaning?
Cut it in half. I don’t mean physically, although that may be an option. I mean remove half of the material, however you define material. If it’s a song, it could mean making it half as long, or taking out half of the instrumental parts. If it’s a sonnet, try to cut it down to a quatrain and a tercet.
How small could this work become before it changes unrecognizably? Is it changing into something else interesting and alive? Or is it losing its vigor? Can you cut it in half again?
2.
After completing the exercise above, set your intermediate drafts and final result aside for a few days or a few weeks.*
Then review the details of your decisions with fresh eyes (or ears) and ask yourself: “Did I lose anything vital or essential in my reductions? Did less turn out to actually be less, not more?”
If you look at your final version as though it is a rough draft, would you be inclined to expand it? Or would you maintain its size and scope and refine what is there already?
* You may have noticed by now that letting ideas age is one of my favorite techniques. It is not the ideas that are altered by time. It’s our perspective on our ideas. Setting a project aside is frequently the best way to ‘work’ on it — as long as the schedule allows for it. I let this piece sit for about ten days and then applied this exercise to an earlier draft of itself. At one point, it had swelled to more than two thousand words! By the time I hit the ‘Publish’ button, it was less than half of that.
