Content Reduction Quotes

Rewrite formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us.

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction.

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.

We set ourselves a limit and cut characters which weren't so vital.

It's hard enough condensing 500 pages into a movie, and it would have been impossible to condense 800.

With a film, you have to pare down and take stuff out and squish it all down into a 110 page script.

When you do a piece of journalism, you may have to cut away 95 percent of what you are experiencing.

The biggest challenge in the research process is to let go, to stop, to say enough, and then to reduce all of that beloved labor down to a few succinct paragraphs that shape the background to your narrative. I love research - that's all the fun, especially in the field. To write, however, is to suffer, and my pieces usually come in thousands of words over the assigned length. That's a serious flaw in my writing process - shaping and disciplining the footlockers of material one has so happily gathered.

When I see a paragraph shrinking under my eyes like a strip of bacon in a skillet, I know I'm on the right track.

It's part of your job always as an editor: you always have to drop stuff.

Every adaptation requires that the screenwriter make difficult choices - and in particular, difficult cuts.

When you adapt a book, you really have to cut it to the essence.

They cut about seven minutes from that broadcast, but it was still vital to the story's momentum.

When books and plays are made into movies, they frequently want to cut out the valleys and just show the peaks.

Rated R movies are few and far between, nowadays. We're all seeing less and less rated R movies, and less and less of them are being made.