On Creating a World
A new way to think about articles and books—and a crowdsourced gift guide!
Hey, so I thought today we’d talk writing instead of existential dread—how about it?
But first—y’all are always suggesting such lovely things to each other on Slack and in writing groups, so I thought I’d pick your brains and ask you to help me compile the very first Epilogue Editing gift guide. Did you write something amazing this year? Read something amazing? Buy really soft yarn or work with an amazing Etsy artist or go to a fantastic cooking retreat? Put it here on this form and I’ll compile a list to share with the good people of this newsletter. This year, of all years, we deserve a little end-of-year treat.
It’s okay to write too much…
I am a big believer that you need to write 25 percent more words than actually appear in the final draft. If your final draft is 10,000 words, you need to write 12,500. If it’s 80,000, you need to write 100,000 (I know. That’s a lot). But you need to write them, and then, very importantly, you need to make them go away.
What do those extra words consist of? Sometimes, it’s just fluff as you try to find your way into the argument. Sometimes it’s discovery writing— you throw in everything you know, because maybe it matters! Who knows until it’s all there!
Other times, it’s defensive writing. This happens when you are worried that people are going to attack or dismiss you, so you preemptively throw everything in the wash to show that you’re awesome and know stuff and have read stuff. So for instance, I was editing a book—and it was great. All of a sudden, I hit this dense, 10-page section, that felt off to me. It was all written in the passive voice. It was more packed with citations than a clown car at the circus. And it just felt weird. So I asked the author — what’s up with this? And she was like “oh, all of those guys hate me. So I’m trying to make them take this book seriously.”
But here’s the thing. Those assholes are never gonna love your work. They’re never going to find it legitimate. And your decision to cede them five percent of the book just proves in their mind that the work you do is illegitimate. It’s like the Democrats and the NRA.
So absolutely, go ahead, write the words. But then, after you write them, you then have to be ready, as Stephen King says, to kill your darlings.
Which darlings should I kill?
When I was in fifth grade, I turned in a 20-page book report. Over a 150-page book (I’ve always been like this). I loved this book, and wanted to capture every detail and every nuance, forever. My heart broke into zillions of little pieces when my teacher asked me to edit it down to two pages. And this is the sad task I’m giving to you.
Over the years I’ve tried talking to folks about this in different ways, using different metaphors. Sometimes we talk about Occam’s razor—only things that support the argument you’re making belong in the piece. Or we talk about scoping: making justifications for what needs to be in and what doesn’t. Or we talk about curation: your job is to select for the audience the details that are most important, and save us the trouble of wading through the rest.
Lately, though, I’ve started thinking about it as world building.
Here’s what I mean. When we start to read an article or a book, we’re giving the author permission, for a little bit, to convince us to inhabit the world they’re creating. They’re making a meta-argument for the way they assemble the universe for us: their ontology, epistemology, method, argument, conclusions, all in a nice little package. Things get cloudy and confusing when you-for reasons of due diligence or anxiety or defensiveness-introduce extraneous stuff into that world, and then don’t take the time to edit it out again.
Think about Chekov’s gun: if you mention that there’s a gun on the table in Act I (just to let us know it’s there because otherwise your audience will never know the main character owns a gun,) and that gun just lies on the table through Act III but no one ever mentions it or picks it up, that’s distracting! Why do we know a gun is there? If it’s not going to fire, get rid of it!
Here’s another example: I was reading an Emily Henry-adjacent rom-com (don’t judge), and we meet the main character’s ex-significant other early in the book. They seemed cool! They had a shady-but-intriguing past! But then…they disappeared! I spent 283 pages waiting for this person to come back into the manuscript as a meet-cute, a plot twist, a gotcha ending…but they were gone forever.
Now, here’s where Occam’s razor/world-building comes in. This character was clearly not necessary for the writer to write a successful book. But then why were they there to begin with? Almost certainly, they were from a previous draft, and just hung on like a vestigial organ. They needed either to be cut, or developed, but not just to linger there. (This is also what a good editor can help you do!)
You see this with cases. People will write a whole book about Nepal, and then say something like “there are historical connections to Tibet too.” and reviewers will pounce. “What do you think of xxxxx that happened in Tibet that is fundamentally different from the claims you make on yyyy page?” And the writer is like “uh I just thought it was kind of a cool connection.” But this reviewer has been waiting their whole life to showboat their knowledge about Tibet. And the author gets thrown into a tailspin, wondering if they need to do field work in Tibet and restructure the whole book to meaningfully engage with Tibetan culture, while Nepal is over there being like “hey! Just pay attention to me!” The answer is, probably, just to cut Tibet (or move it to the conclusion under “future research.”)
How to think about world-building
Okay, so we’re building a world inside a book or article that can be totally self-sufficient. This means that the only thing you let inside the book or article are things necessary for the life and health of the project. And if you bring it into the project, you need to be ready to sustain it: engage with it meaningfully in conversation, consider it in the context of what you’re arguing, and then show how your project advanced the conversation about everything you brought in.
This means that extraneous or tangential references or discussions or cases or data get bounced. Things you’re including just because you know them get bounced. Things you’re including because you want your nemesis to know you’ve read it or that you can do fancy math? Also bounced. (You can bounce them to a blank document! They don’t need to be gone forever!)
Reverse outlining (where you take the manuscript and write out the thesis statement of every single paragraph to see how it holds together) can be a really helpful tool here. It lets you identify all of the threads and ingredients you introduce early in the work, and then you can continue to trace those threads to make sure they’re still there later.
Two last thoughts
First: people sometimes worry this is dishonest, or cherry picking, or that I’m telling them to only select the data that supports their argument. No! I’m saying exactly the opposite: you let readers into the world as you understand it, warts and all. If theories are imprecise, say that. If your data is inconclusive, explain why it’s worth considering anyway. Often times papers that build incomplete or cloudy worlds do it in an attempt to obfuscate or cover up for what they perceive to be a paper’s weaknesses. My argument is that you instead make the best argument you can for converting the weakness into a strength.
Second: people sometimes think they’re shortchanging the reader. But y’all, when I go to the MOMA, I don’t want to see all 1056 Matisse paintings in existence. I want to see the seven that really smart art folks think speak to each other, or to this current moment. And those seven might inspire me to find another seven, but I don’t want to decide which seven are the most important. You tell me! You are the expert. We are trusting you to be our filter. Curating all the stuff you know, putting it into a stylized piece of writing, and then making an argument about it, instead of just presenting raw data, is truly a mitzvah to your readers.
Write all the things,
Kelly
What’s going on around here
Editing: I’m accepting new projects to edit in 2025! My editing calendar fills up three-to-six months in advance, so if you have something you’re hoping to get edited, this is a great time to chat about it.
Also! This is the last week for discounted registration to the writers’ circles. I hope you’ll join us in the spring!
Spring 2025 Writers’ Circles (January-March 2025)
Small groups of no more than eight people focused on creating the conditions to write more, and more effectively. With a separate cohort for mid-career scholars. (Discounted registration through November 15!)
So You Want to Write A Book?
A unique hybrid workshop dedicated to supporting writers throughout their book writing journey. Join us in early 2025 for workshops on book proposals and revision, or start with a new cohort in May.
January workshop: Book proposals and book marketing
April workshop: The art (and science?) of revision
May 2025-April 2026: beginning and accelerated (discounted registration through February 1)