Killing all kinds of darlings
Volume 4, Number 9 | September 2010
There's a wonderful phrase that's been attributed to various writers over the years (most obscurely to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, which means he's probably the true provenance) calling for the artist—the writer, in this case—to "murder your darlings."
As someone who writes notoriously long essays, emails and articles (not to mention comes from a long line of packrats), I have a passing familiarity with the predilection for hanging onto useless stuff. My year-long jettisoning of physical stuff has started making me aware of all the other, non-physical stuff that's also better-off purged.
The first three paragraphs of this newsletter, for example: sure, they were all brilliant words of inspiration, but they were not to the point; they helped get me to the point. And once I arrived, I let them go.
I've found that reasoning to be really helpful when trashing perfectly good stuff I've worked hard to create: like the energy people spent in the olden days priming a pump, efforts aren't wasted if they get you where you want to be. And where I want to be is helping people get from here to there in the most efficient way possible.
The bottom line: no one has time to read a longer letter these days. So if you want to be heard, you must take the time to write a shorter one.
Here are a handful of places that could benefit by some careful subtracting (and even more careful adding.)
Killing your darling pixels
Are you an actor—or worse, a civilian—who has the last four sets of headshots on your site? Time to purge. People want to know what you look like now.
Even if all your shots are current, if they range widely in feeling, consider a serious edit: you want to present yourself to the world as you want the world to see you, and the world doesn't have a lot of time to parse.
Killing your darling accomplishments
As we age, we rack up additional skills, gigs and kudos. The benefit of this is not getting to have the world's longest resume, but the world's most killer one.
If it's been more than a year since you've looked at how you talk about yourself, look at how you talk about yourself, and with a red pen in hand. (
I'm overlong and overdue, although I have a fairly fresh
short bio.) You never, ever want to be the person in a group with the lamest accomplishments and the longest bio.
Killing your darling doodads
As they say in the design trade, just because you can use 100 different typefaces on your document today doesn't mean you should.
The same goes for all the badges, widgets and other digital hoo-ha you can stick on your website or Facebook page or Twitter background. By all means, if you're truly active on several social media sites, find a tasteful way of letting people know. But when you give me 147 possible options of where to find you, or what to click on your site/blog/newsletter first, I'm going to exercise the most obvious one: leave to go somewhere less confusing.
Killing your darling skillz
Yes, this is a challenging economy, and we want to make sure that any random person whose hand we can shove our card into knows every single thing we might be hireable for, every credential that proves we're the most hireable person for any of those things, and where they can reach us in every possible way to hire us for one of them.
Only I don't think we do. I think we want to show restraint, offering the ONE thing we want to be hired for, and a MINIMUM of ways to contact us. And I realize I'm probably in the minority, here, but I think that unless you're a licensed professional in a field where it's mission-critical—say, heart surgeon or electricion—you should consider leaving off superfluous alphabet soup.
Restraint is not only classy, in this case, it gives you back soothing expanses of white space for the recipient to make notes on about how specifically awesome they found you to be.
* * *
Sometimes it's hard seeing what should stay and what should go; it's why all those makeover and purging shows are so popular. Clueless people! Don't they know those mullets/too-small acid-wash jeans/ceiling-high stack of mismatched Tupperware is doing them no favors?
From time to time we can all use a gentle but critical eye to help us focus on what's best and let go of the rest. I should have an announcement here and/or on the blog sometime next month letting you know about some ways I can help you to do that.
In the meantime, as we sail into these last months of 2010 (I know! I know!), I'll be revisiting, revising, and throwing things away like mad on my own website, in an effort to make it easier for you to find what's good—and more importantly, what you want to find. If there's anything you've found particularly frustrating—or have been frustrated trying to find—I would love to hear about it.
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