The Discipline of Cutting the Length of a Piece of Writing

In this New Yorker article, John McPhee tells what he’s learned over the years from editors who’ve asked him to cut down the length of his drafts. The most brutal process was when he was a writer at Time Magazine. After working on an article for four days and having it approved by the editors, writers were asked by the Makeup department to “green” a specific number of lines from the galleys (mark them with a green pencil) so the article would fit into the limited space in that week’s issue – “Green 5” or “Green 8” or “Green 15,” came the last-minute demands from Makeup. “Groan as much as you liked,” says McPhee, “you had to green nearly all your pieces, and greening was a craft in itself – studying your completed and approved product, your ‘finished’ piece, to see what could be left out.” 

Calvin Trillin was a colleague of McPhee’s at Time and remembers the process fondly. It was “a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle,” he says. “I was surprised that what I had thought of as a tightly constructed seventy-line story – a story so tightly constructed that it had resisted the inclusion of that maddening leftover fact – was unharmed, or even improved, by greening ten percent of it.”

McPhee found the process so helpful that he’s made it a regular part of the college writing classes he teaches. Students are given nine or ten prose passages and asked to “green” a specific number of lines from each. Here are some of the passages he’s used:

• 32 lines from Joseph Conrad – “going up that river… like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world…” Green 3
• 20 lines from Thomas McGuane’s ode to the tarpon as grand piano – Green 3
• 9 lines of Irving Stone’s passionate declaration of his love of stone – Green 1
• 25 lines of Philip Roth’s character Lonoff describing the writing process – Green 3
• Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (all 25 lines) – Green 3
• A choice of students’ own pieces – Green ten percent.

“The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed,” says McPhee. “Easier with some writers than with others. It’s as if you were removing freight cars here and there in order to shorten a train – or pruning bits and pieces of a plant for reasons of aesthetics or plant pathology, not to mention size. Do not do violence to the author’s tone, manner, nature, style, thumbprint.” 

McPhee’s college writing course is titled Creative Nonfiction, and here’s his description of what’s involved in this genre, where parsimony of words is so important: “The creativity lies in what you choose to write about, how you go about doing it, the arrangement through which you present things, the skill and the touch with which you describe people and succeed in developing them as characters, the rhythms of your prose, the integrity of the composition, the anatomy of the piece (does it get up and walk around on its own?), the extent to which you see and tell the story that exists in your material…” 

“Omission: Choosing What to Leave Out” by John McPhee in The New Yorker, September 14, 2015 (p. 42-49), http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/14/omission 

From the Marshall Memo #615