Killing the darlings

I have just spent the whole day on the floor of my studio apartment, because my desk was not large enough for the amount of paper I have scattered around. The paper I am writing together with my supervisor for the Participatory Design Conference in August is due by the end of this week, and for the very first time, I find myself struggling to fit everything I want to convey into the limited number of pages. Normally, I put all my effort into typing out all that might sound anything close to relevant just so that I can have fair amount of pages to hand in.

Now I have come to the point of my writing that I have to delete some of the darling sentences that I have worked on, to make all the content fit in to the louzy four pages. After all the years of trying to get enough in to my papers, I find deleting some of it so much worse! Somehow everything seems to be connected, and if I cross out a small part, a different part gets messed up. However, all of this might be just another case of being blinded by my own stubborness.

I ones read an interesting paper on writing articles by Sørensen (2002) as a part of syllabus for a course on qualitative research methods at uni. Sørensen gives a set of helpful guidelines for the novice writer (moi), and many of them have been helpful in my current situation:

• Keep it simple by having only one point per paper, and by only sticking your neck into one guillotin
• Being a copycat can pay off
• Polish  packaging  and  content.
• Writing and reviewing are two sides of the same coin

The paragraph or section that you’ve spent much time writing and re-writing, and  maybe  invested  most of  your  pride  in,  need  necessarily  not  be  very  communicative.  You  should,  hence,  always  be prepared  to  “kill  your  darlings”  if  these  darlings  are  only  your  own 

(Sørensen 2002:12). 

And he is most certainly right. I have found that deleting some sentences gives one quick sting of anguish for about a millisecond, before I realize that, hey, it all makes so much more sense now!

References:


Sørensen, C. (revised version of 2002): This is Not an Article - just some food for thought on how to write one, Working Paper. Department of Information Systems, The London School of Economics and Political Science. No. 121.