by Lei Wang
(title after the Maggie Smith poem)
Maple syrup is made by boiling down the much more watery maple sap, the stuff that actually comes from the trees and is only 2% sugar. It takes 40 gallons of maple sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. My college writing professor used this as a metaphor for the writing process. By this measure, I have 15 pages of my book instead of 600.
I used to think good writing was about beautiful, ornate language; my early blog was full of embellished sentences that meant very little. Someone in my translation class called this act of needless prettifying (as when a translator commits the crime of making the original text fancier than it is) “gilding the yam.” (As opposed to gilding the lily, which is more of a fashion crime.) Then I got over beauty, entered the camp of meaning. But how to determine what is truly meaningful, when so much can be? And thus another writer not inaccurately described my essays as “a smart person sits you down to teach you about life but gets distracted 18 times along the way.”
It’s hard not to gild the yam. I still want to make a flurry of connections in an ADHD pastiche. I have often been better at spontaneous stir-fries than a focused dish; bibimbap is for lazy people. And now I have too many food metaphors.
So much of writing is decision-making: thousands of moments of determining what is actually important instead of trying to stuff everything in. Too much fat in writing is not just overenthusiasm, but usually a sign of something more insidious. For me, it has something to do with trying to prove something, wanting to Show My Work. “Look at my effort!” I want to say, which hasn’t mattered since high school math class. True brilliance is not diffuse light but the pointy kind.
I have spent the last month in a little cabin in the woods trying to be pointy. How do I turn 600 pages into 150 pages of semi-syrup? What is actually essential? What, to use another metaphor from the above-mentioned writing professor, is my David, the figure in the marble that is only revealed when the inessential is carved away? In a cabin, I’m also reminded, of course, that I need very little to live. The David is enough, not more shoes and pudding.
Not everything is important, which sometimes feels unfair. I used to hate putting people and ideas into boxes in journalism, but this is what we all do; we can only try to make the boxes better.
Declarations of meaning are vulnerable. To make pronouncements instead of hedges and caveats. Having a strong opinion opens you up for rejection but also rewards you with an identity, which is something I still have to learn in relationships.
I am currently ambiguously dating a clown whose clown teacher has many rules, because even clowns need constraints. One of the rules is “More, more, more!” Always be giving the audience more. And yet the teacher’s advice was that actually, for him, more more more could be less less less. He could do with fewer movements on stage; the movements, while outwardly very showy, were actually hiding something more important, something better.
I think of Antoine de Saint-Exupery taking two years to perfect every line of The Little Prince, which is only 16,000 words total.
And yet writing is not actually carved from a single block of marble. According to Matt Bell’s craft book on writing, Refuse to Be Done, sometimes we first have to make a map the size of the city before we can make a map the size of a map. (This is also the premise of a Borges short story.)
I tried to keep this column shorter than usual, under a thousand words, when I usually venture into the 2500-word range, as if more is more. Which brings us back to another instruction from my college writing teacher, who would not abide our crossing the word limit on any assignment. She defended her decision via a line from Wordsworth praising the limited form of the sonnet: “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.” For it is within their tiny rooms that they meet God, the biggest thing possible.
If you truly couldn’t kill your darlings completely, she suggested attaching a cemetery document with scraps of your favorite deleted phrases, may they rest in peace.
Constraints aren’t just of time and space.
For my best friend, her difficulties in writing came from working under the wrong psychological constraints. Every time she sat down to write, she would be asking, “Does the sentence sound smart? Does it sound prestigious? Am I writing about things that people will pay money to read?” It was not only until she started asking the right question—“am I actually interested in this material?”—that she was able to make progress. And it’s not a one-time question, but a continuous re-calibration. (Now she also runs an AI start-up doing the very same thing, giving AI agents the right constraints so they channel their enormous intelligence into something pointedly useful, instead of doing a lot of busy work.)
Of course, as Oliver Burkeman and Leo Tolstoy would attest, everything comes down to being infinite beings living in finite lives. It’s impossible to really finish anything, but we make do.
The clown told me secondhand something some Buddhist monks had told him: when uncertain about something, as one is with many things in life, why not take the path that is more full of love or whatever it is you most value? Then you are not making many decisions; you are making just one decision. No one can really see the road far ahead, but you are putting one foot in front of the other, and each foot is pointing towards the ultimate direction. That’s the only way anything gets done anyway.
RIP
A contradictory writing-as-food metaphor, via Jack Gilbert:
“The spirit dances, comes and goes. But the soul is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon lodged under the ribs. What lasted is what the soul ate.”
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