The Writer’s Best Friend is the Trashcan (Revisited)
I have something like 10 simple mottos I keep in mind that have helped me as a writer. I’ve accumulated them from various sources and moments, and I have brought them to mind enough times to turn them first into mantras, then into habits that no longer need to be brought to mind so often.
In 2018, I got the idea to notice these mottos, and share them. I would write about each, one at a time.
The first motto I chose for this study is the oldest one I have carried, a principle I heard when I was 20 years old or so: “The writer’s best friend is the trashcan.” I posted an essay about this idea. And that piece is true in the way nearly every true thing is true. Namely: It is true as far as it goes.
But this year (2023), I reread that piece from five years ago and discovered there is more to say, farther to go. So I have expanded upon that original article. The trashcan is still the writer’s best friend, but friendships, particularly the best ones, become deeper and stronger over time.
What follows is the original piece I wrote about the worth of cutting and discarding. Following that is the expansion I now see to add. And then, lower down on this page, find links to the other simple mottos I have written about since this first piece appeared —PZ
The Writer’s Best Friend Is the Trashcan: My Original Article (Still True)
“The writer’s best friend is the trashcan,” said the novelist whom I would never knowingly encounter again.
I heard him speak this line when I was age 20 or so. An audience of mostly college students sufficiently interested in writing to offer part of an afternoon had come to pepper the seats of an auditorium in order to hear a published novelist speak. He was no one whose work I knew. I quickly forgot his name and I am not sure I even heard the title(s) of his book(s). But I should have remembered, because this one line—which he said matter-of-factly, simply in response to an audience member’s question—has remained with me and has been a touchstone of mine ever since. I owe that novelist my gratitude. His offhand comment about the writer’s craft still comes to mind and still serves me decades later.
I’ve found there are two broad ways for a writer to underserve the reader: writing too little and writing too much. The former category includes many; it includes the writer in school who is padding lines to try to reach the length requirement of an assignment. It includes the professional who makes a statement within a report that, unknown to him, puzzles every reader of the report except the people very close to him who already know what he means. It includes almost everyone who does not want to write but must from time to time. It also includes the working writer, fresh to the craft, who is still gaging how far to go in explaining assertions to the reader and making ideas explicit.
The second category also includes many. Namely, it includes many writers, and it might even be a necessary stage in the working writer’s growth. The writer working through this area of development gives too much energy and attention to the writing, the sentences and paragraphs, rather than the meaning the work aims to convey. The meaning is obviously the point, and if that meaning can be delivered with a short piece as well as it can be with a long one, then shorter is better—we all know this much. But in the trenches, it can be difficult to see which of the passages you yourself have written is not essential to the task at hand.
I became aware I was leaving this stage once I found myself sympathizing with the reader to the point of feeling glee at cutting complete paragraphs or series of paragraphs from my work. Reading a draft of my writing in hard copy, I would see a passage I suddenly realized was an unnecessary side road, and I would draw a great X through that span of text as a mark of victory. Yay, I had done the reader a favor! I had saved the reader the effort and distraction of reading that passage. To write a draft is necessarily an exploratory exercise; we proceed by feel to find the way to the message. Since the reader does not need to see the entire exploration, not everything in the draft should survive. Writing well involves judgment about what to leave out every bit as much as it involves judgment about what to put in.
What do I leave out? I want to leave out anything that can clear the way for the main point of the piece to shine more clearly when it is removed. That is, anything that requires the reader to give thought to something other than the main point. I leave out obstacles such as this. Passages I aim to cut also include elaborate defenses against quibbles the reader is unlikely to raise. Also, elaborate descriptions of implications that could be addressed with just one line instead.
A passage I would see to cut might also include (here is the big one) the discourse that feels necessary only because it scratches an itch I want to scratch, such as pressing a point of view I want to champion, or sharing something unrelated I learned in the course of researching the piece, even though the piece would do just fine without this digression.
How do I leave this stuff out? How do I cut it from my drafts? The answer gets to the weirdest part: I do so by means of a split personality. To grow as a writer is to get better at being one’s own reader. And getting better in this way specifically means becoming more effective at shutting off the memory of having written the words in order to receive the work as a stranger would receive it. The capacity is nothing less than dualism—being a writer first, then shifting into a different frame of perception in order to be the reader who can aid this writer.
I know no way to get to this dualism except through practice. Let yourself see yourself cutting your own self’s own work. Let it keep on seeing this. Let it see the revisions of another editor who will cut the work gladly. The dualism will develop.
One of the most telling indicators of what to cut is this: the passage in which the “reader” part of my dualism is getting bored. Even with the split personality, I am the reader who is the most invested in my work. If even I am not interested in something I have written, no one else will be interested in that passage either.
Sometimes the writer part of me will protest the reader’s cuts, so there are tactics. I use the “Save As” command rather than “Save.” I will make my cuts within version 2 of a document while preserving the earlier draft in version 1. This leaves me an out in case I later decide the cuts were a dreadful mistake. (I never decide this.) For large passages I cut, I paste the removed passage in its entirety into a separate document so I can keep that passage and return to make use of it later. (I never return to make use of it later.)
In writing for a print publication, sometimes I have to cut to match the precise space available in the layout. Here, it is not the split-personality reader urging my cuts. Here, the writing has already met the split-personality reader’s approval, and I am cutting it still further. The cutting in this case might produce a work that is less effective and less clear than the slightly longer original. The out I have in this case is the online version; I can perhaps allow the digital version of the piece to use the better, longer version of the text. However, as the print version comes to sit with me, I discover something strange: If I did manage to make my point successfully within the 490 words that fit the layout rather than the 517 words of the previously finished piece, then the 490-word version dawns on me as being the better version, even if I wasn’t able to see this at first.
If it can be cut, it should be cut. Our development as writers involves getting better at seeing what can be shed, what can be left out, what didn’t have to be picked up in the first place. The great writer is one who, among other things, recognizes the great scope and extent of all that need not be written.
What You Leave In: Further Reflections Five Years Later
For writers, there are different kinds of cutting. One aspect of a writer cutting her own work involves the cuts we make to improve a piece before we make it public, and the article above is largely about this kind of cutting. However, another area to consider is when we cut works in their entirety. That is, we cut our losses by abandoning a piece of writing that just does not seem to be coming together or does not seem worth the effort. The piece above hinted at this area of cutting only at the very end, and this part of the topic—this use of the trashcan—is what I want to take up now.
Is the trashcan literally the writer’s “best” friend? Maybe. The statement in the headline of this piece has proven so useful to me as a motto and habit that I wish to subtract nothing from it. However, the greatest and most necessary companion to the writer is not the receptacle for the unused materials, but instead the source for the material that is used, the seeds that lead to finished writing. For the non-fiction writer, this includes curiosity, insight, knowledge, and sources. For the fiction writer or essayist, this includes experiences, empathy, imagination, and suffering. The trashcan is a good friend, but the “best” friend to writers must be these wellsprings. That is, the writer’s best friend is the muse.
Or not. Perhaps the nature of the communion with the muse is so intimate that “friend” is a poor term to describe it. In which case, the statement in the headline stands.
I mention this, because I want to shine a light on a point of presumption that figured into the original article above. You probably saw or sensed it as you read. It is this: The article describes two broad ways for a writer to “underserve” the reader, with the implication that these are stages of immaturity. As though, what, the one writing these words is fully mature and knows precisely how the reader ought to be served? Well.
I believe I’ve come to see a third stage, a third broad way for the writer to underserve the reader. This is the stage of militancy, efficiency, and yes, presumption—the stage of “knowing,” from experience, what the piece of writing should consist of and contain, and filling in these elements as though through paint-by-numbers. This is the stage of not taking the trouble with pieces that are troublesome.
I have had a particular lyric on the edge of my mind all through writing this piece. One line from a lyric: What to leave in, what to leave out. I had to Google to remind myself that this line appears in the song, “Against the Wind,” by Bob Seger. The song is about the way we push deliberately against the opposing forces of life for the sake of exploration and adventure when we are young, and how this then becomes the thing we must continue to do for the sake of thriving and survival once we are older. How it never gets easy and we should not look for it to get easy. Except we get lulled into looking for this ease.
The line I mention appears in the third verse of the song and the third stage of the singer’s story:
Well those drifter’s days are past me now
I’ve got so much more to think about
Deadlines and commitments
What to leave in, what to leave out
Against the wind
I’m still running against the wind
I’m older now but still running against the wind
I want a fourth verse, or a fourth stage beyond the three stages I have mentioned. This involves no longer taking the muse for granted, no longer treating what the muse offers with ingratitude. It involves sometimes going to the trouble when the piece is troublesome, sometimes forgoing efficiency in order to find and share whatever the struggle might produce. Doing this requires experience, and practice, and craft, but then it also entails letting go completely of presumption in order to find the thing of inconvenient worth that the muse is presenting.
An example. I recently posted a piece called “Worry.” The writing of this piece came so close to the trashcan. The article was not working. All the connective passages meant to knit the piece together aimed at counseling the reader in how to avoid and manage the topic of the piece, worrying. And it was all falling flat, because I have no idea how to give this counsel. I don’t know how to help you stop worrying. My ignorance and failure were apparent; I threw my draft of the piece away. But as this draft was handwritten, the pages did not go to the literal trashcan (the recycling bin), but instead they went to the drawer where I shut away pages I have abandoned, the drawer from which the trashcan is generally the next step.
Yet not in this case. I pulled the piece back out later, and discovered that something about my abandonment of it had given me a new lease to try again. The abandonment in this case was not an abandonment of the topic, but instead an abandonment of my own pride in how I wrote about it. I had to face the truth and share the truth that I am writing about worry even though I don’t know enough about worry to be able to save you or me from experiencing it. The resulting article is one of the best-received pieces, in terms of response from readers, of anything I have posted to this site in a long time.
The work is, sometimes, work. The writer who does it and the self we bring to it are always growing and changing, always becoming less immature. The truth is not going anywhere, but we need to bend and sometimes break in order to draw nearer to it. And part of the reason why the trashcan is such a friend is because it might provide the final refuge in which the muse can at last be heard.
Originally posted as “The Writer’s Best Friend Is the Trashcan” on July 22, 2018
Other posts on mottos that have helped me as a writer: