Here’s the best tip I know about editing.

 It’s also a lot easier to say than it is to do.

It’s something I struggle with.

Here’s a story about it.

When I wrote the story about Mary Shelley and her jealous “friend”, I was having a lot of fun.

That story is from a book I read last year, a book I find sort of mystifying, called the laws of human nature.

I read the laws of human nature because I liked the title, the idea behind it. A 900 page book that claims to tell you — well, the title.

It wants to be a Bible — but for like, people who read dude self-help books.

The author, Robert Greene, puts a lot of famous people in there.

Martin Luther King Junior, Flannery O’Connor, Catherine the Great. He uses stories from their lives to talk about the lesson he is imparting in the chapter.

It is almost always a story I did not know from that famous person’s life.

After I read this, I realized Robert Greene has written like 30 other books.

One of them, the art of seduction, is considered the ultimate pick up artist manual.

Yikes.

It wasn’t hugely shocking to me that this man wrote a book pick up artists love: many of his conclusions are things like “people will hurt you so you must act mysterious to keep yourself alive. Also, pay attention to microexpressions”.

He writes things that seem like Cersei Lannister quotes. 

But what I did find interesting is another book he wrote, in partnership with 50 Cent.

It uses the same structure as the laws of human nature but with scenes from 50 Cent’s life.

That book is the second most requested book in prison libraries across the United States.

I think that’s really interesting. And I have a lot of questions about it, a lot of questions that go far beyond Robert Greene. 

For example:

What’s the first most requested book and prison libraries across the United States? (This one I learned. It’s the autobiography of Malcolm x).

How did Robert Greene and 50 Cent decide to write this book together?

Why is this at the top of that library list?

And:

Who is Robert Greene?

What is his whole deal?

Here’s the thing. When I started writing the Mary Shelley piece, I had a very long paragraph about Robert Greene’s whole deal that slowly but surely shrank.

I didn’t know the answer to most of the questions I listed above. The only thing I really knew was Robert Greene and all of his books are simultaneously at the top of the “don’t date a man who has this on his bookshelf Twitter list” and the “most requested prison library books”.

So I wrote that down, with the idea that this paragraph would continue to expand, fit into the flow of the rest of the piece.

But unfortunately for me, that never happened.

I had not figured out more about this man at the time of writing the Mary Shelley piece.

So as my paragraph on Robert Greene dwindled, I had less and less context to quantify that sentence. Eventually, I had gotten rid of so much of the previous paragraph that this sentence stood on its own: another book by Robert Greene is the #2 most requested book in prison libraries across the country.

Yes. And? What’s your point? I didn’t know.

I didn’t have enough to write anything else meaningful about that.

And out of context, this fact seemed sneering, way out of my depth.

So! I took it out. The second I took it out I was like…

Duh. This piece has nothing to do with Robert Greene. 

It’s about jealousy and Mary Shelley.

The sentence, and all of the possibilities it represented, had nothing to do with the story I was telling.

It wasn’t like taking out this one sentence completely transformed that piece into Pulitzer Prize winning material. 

But I share this story here because it reminded me of an obvious but hard part of editing.

So, here’s my #1 editing tip.

If you don’t care enough to understand out why you want to say something, you probably shouldn’t say it.

Had I continued my Robert Greene research, maybe I would’ve ended up with something that tied it all together.

Maybe I would’ve ended up with something a lot more interesting, that pushed me out of my comfort zone: a piece about what people want to read in prison libraries, why other people find this guy compelling, how jealousy across gender race time and space can connect us all.

But that wasn’t my goal when I was writing it.

My goal was to write about Mary Shelley, to convince myself I could write compellingly about jealousy, about a relationship that I found disturbingly familiar because of my own jealousy, and do it all without totally scaring the crap out of myself.

So Robert Greene, and that fact, had to wait.

If you don’t care enough to understand out why you want to say something, you probably shouldn’t say it in that piece.

H