I chuckled along in agreement while reading Mr. Breakfast’s delightful tirade:
“Know your audience…You can always tell when a writer wants to please their audience too much: the desperation seeps through every sentence, and it’s disgusting. The best writers maintain a healthy distrust of their audience, and in some cases are motivated by a desire to actively repel them.”
“Cut unnecessary words. This one sounds good at first—ditch a “needless to say” here, an “in my opinion” there, and soon your writing is flowing much more smoothly. But where does it end? When you really think about it, all of your writing is probably unnecessary. I mean, does anyone really need this newsletter? If I cut out all the unnecessary words, there’d be nothing left.”
Clearly, I’m the pure Canadian maple syrup to Mr. Breakfast’s pancake, because I already thought editing was kind of bad and kind of dishonest.1 In the realm of art, I struggle to see what insight into the fraught human experience an editor (qua editor) can offer that a writer can’t. We’re all guessing here. They say every good writer needs a good editor. Maybe every good writer should just be a better writer.2
“Show, don’t tell” strikes me as the kind of received wisdom that so often turns art into a game of autoregressive tastemanship. Plus, rejecting that particular rule has produced great results.
Perhaps, if Jonathan Bogart’s optimistic take is to be believed, the trick is to alienate all save 100-ish people (way ahead of Mr. Bogart there):
if there’s one thing that streaming has made clear, it’s that the actual listening done by the vast invisible bulk of the music-listening public is much more wide-ranging than whatever is making record companies enough money in a given week to be considered to have charted. I listen to a lot of 78-r.p.m. records on YouTube, and while it’s rare for them to have a viewcount that exceeds 100,000, it’s equally a rarity to see viewcounts below 100. To continue the linguistic analogy, a relatively small community of speakers doesn’t mean a language is dead, and in the recording era it’s nearly impossible for anything to ever truly die; even if live performance and music instruction somehow faded away, they could be resurrected from records.
This week’s is kind of a companion to Techstopera, from about 2015 or so. The buzzy, mbira-like guitar sound might be my favourite ever guitar tone. Strictly necessary. Buckle up.
Copy editing is…fine…, if a little boring.
I’ll grant that non-fiction is another story.