WRITING CRAFT: HOW TO SAY MORE BY WRITING LESS

The last two lines of Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”: Henry has just lost Catherine. He walks back to the hotel in the rain. No naming of grief. No interior monologue. No explanation of what the loss means. Just a man, a hotel, rain.

You feel it more than you would if it were explained

Compression is the deliberate act of removing explanation and trusting the reader to feel what you’ve set up. Every word that remains is the result of something being removed. The quality of what’s left depends on the quality of what’s gone.

In this post, you’ll learn what compression actually is (and what it isn’t), why omission is a technique rather than an absence, the writers who’ve practised it at the highest level, and how to compress your own work without losing what it needs.

Deep Writing is a working library, organised into six stages that give every kind of storyteller something useful.

1 Giving yourself permission to start.

2 Finding an idea worth pursuing.

3 Drafting it.

4 Sharpening your craft through writing.

5 Applying it to your own creative work.

6 Revising it into something finished.

FULL CURRICULUM

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