My Chosen Corner of Crazy

Wordiness

We, as writers, want to paint with our words a beautiful picture of what is inside our minds so that others may share our dreams, musings, and experiences. While attempting to facilitate this goal we will often become overly elaborate in our descriptions or detailed mannerisms. I like to compare drawing or painting to writing. In particular I remember hearing a story that I think is applicable to this discussion.

A man and a woman were on a date. As they walked down the street to meet their reservation for the evening they noticed an artist doing portraits. After negotiating a price the artist took a picture of the woman for reference and the couple continued off to their destination. After eating their dinner they came back to the artist to pick up the portrait. Upon looking at his work the man and woman were astounded at the quality and beauty of it. They were quite happy even though it had costed a fair amount of money, that is until the man looked closer at the portrait. In total this beautiful piece of artwork was comprised of six simple lines. Confused the man asked the artist, "how long did it take you to do this?" The artist's response, "twenty years."

I believe this story expresses the general point here. Just as with the artist we too are making our own pieces of artwork. In the beginning it will take us many lines to properly portray a vision or idea, but as we become more comfortable and competent the number of lines needed lessens. Just as the artist used the blank pieces of page, or negative space, we two learn to rely upon the minds of our readers. We operate with intent, but we also realized that very little is needed to prod the mind into creating a stunning image. The minds ability to draw conclusions, connections, and visualize is far beyond our ability to write in most cases. So use it, don't cloud your pages with needless words and phrases, choose your strokes carefully and deliberately. Work with the readers mind and interpretations, not against them.