You Need to Get Surgical About Your Writing

"Throw out good stuff to get the best stuff.”

Licensed from Adobe Stock // Cristina Conti

It’s rare I read an essay that puts me on pause. But it happens. Amidst the rubble of Elon Musk fanboy pieces and lessons learned from the centurion set, there are storytellers who go deep. They draw cross-cultural references and care less about clickbait titles and tidy 5-minute reads to deliver something meaningful and real.

An essay where you felt you learned beyond its borders. An essay that had you clicking all the names and going down rabbit holes of delicious, wanton knowledge. I don’t skim, I immerse. Writer, I will follow you into the dark.

Enter David Perell’s “Expression is Compression,” (via Benek Lisefski, whom everyone should be reading because he writes and shares the best stuff) which made me think about the power, impact, and weight of the words I use and how I use them.

“Experiences become shareable creations the way tree sap becomes maple syrup.” So starts the essay that draws from Picasso, Rene Magritte, Plato, Alfred Korzybsky, and New York City subway maps to demonstrate how the power of distilling ideas into a compressed state is the embodiment of creative excellence.

You make it look so easy, everyone thinks they can do it too — that’s the objective. You’re the George Saunders of storytelling.

This is not as simple as using fewer words in an essay. It’s about the words you choose and their arrangement. The arrangement makes the music, composes the symphony. It’s about better words — an excavation of the English language to find the precise word or term that holds court above the rest — examples that cut to the core, stories and images that house multiple Choose Your Own Adventure narratives.