The New Yorker legend calls on sources from Shakespeare to Hemingway and Trillin, as well as his younger self, to explain how a writer decides what to leave out of a story: "The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed … 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."
September 13, 2015
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