Essentialism (XXII): Eliminate: Edit

 "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." - Michaelangelo

Of all the roles in film making, says McKeown, one of the most unknown and  underrated is that of the film editor.  It is a category in the Academy Awards, but almost no-one outside of the industry actual knows any of the names of film editors.  An interesting fact is that - since 1981 and as of the writing of the book in 2014 - not one film had won Best Picture which had not also been nominated for Best Film Editing.

The fact may not be obvious to us as viewers, except when one sees a much longer version of the film - a "Director's Cut" or some other edition.  If one is familiar with the released movie, one begins to appreciated the care and effort made to craft the whole movie:  things end up on the cutting room floor not just because of time, but because of the fact that it does not contribute to the whole of the movie.

Editing - defined by McKeown as "The strict elimination of the trivial, unimportant, or irrelevant"- is a core Essentialist trait.  It is a deliberate act performed to subtract which in turn adds to the whole, like a book editor who subtracts from the author's work in order to "add new life to the ideas, settings, plot, or characters".  As one editor defines it, "My job is to help the reader have clearest possible understanding of the most important message or takeaways."

By editing, we are forced to undertake that Essentialist task of making tradeoffs.  Instead of, like an author, having everything in the book, we have to decide what things will make it better.  It may mean killing characters, eliminating pages of written text, or even starting over - Steven Pressfield relates that his first draft of The Hot Gates was over 900 pages; the final version is around one-third of that.

How does the Essentialist get there?

1) Cut Out Options:   Editing involves cutting out anything that obscures the main message.  Cutting out options means consciously eliminating other potential decision trees - but that, suggests McKeown, is the essence of Essentialism.

McKeown makes the point that the Latin root of the word decision - cis, or cid - literally means "to cut" (thus words like scissors, homicide, fratricide, so deciding really is "cutting things out".  And by cutting things out, we make the remaining things more clear and give ourselves more time to concentrate on those things that "made the cut".

2) Condense:  For the writer, every word, every sentence, every scene should matter.  An editor is someone that is ruthless in making that happen:  Can one word be used in place of two?  As Alan D. Williams (an editor) observes "There are two basic questions to an author: What is it you want to say?, and Are you saying it as clearly and concisely as possible? "

At its heart, condensing means less waste, not doing more at once:  "Thus, to apply the principle of condensing to our lives we need to shift the ratio of activities to meaning.  We need to eliminate multiple meaningless activities and replace them with one meaningful activity."

3) Correct:  To correct simply means to make something right.  For an editor, it means understanding the overall thrust of a work;  a good editor, says Michael Kahn, does not always do what the author tells him to do, he does what he thinks the author really wants him to do. This, he says, helps him to make corrections that the author themselves might not even be able to verbalize.

It is the same for the Essentialist, says McKeown.  By making course corrections to come back to our core purpose - once we understand and have established it - we can compare our activities and actions to our real intent, and change if necessary..

4) Edit Less:  A great editor, McKeown states, does not just edit. They also understand when not to edit, to leave certain things as they are although they may violate the "rules" or intent of the work - because they see the work as a whole. They have the ability to show restraint.

In a similar vein, the Essentialist as the editor of their lives needs to practice the same sort of restraint.  It is not always necessary to immediately step in - here McKeown uses the examples of the e-mail thread where our first temptation may be to jump in first and hit "reply all" or being in a meeting and always insisting on giving our opinion.  Instead, we can wait, watch, observe, see how things develop.  Sometimes doing less is really doing more.

The Non-essentialist struggles with the idea of editing, seeing it as something to do only when everything else has become overwhelming. This is precisely the wrong time to do such things, as it may entail major changes or cuts not of our own making. Better, suggests McKeown, to follow the path of  the Essentialist, to edit our activities along the way in order to make periodic and deliberate adjustments.  Make this a habit, he says, and the process of "the main thing being the main" thing in our lives will become a cadence which is natural and unforced.

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Application:

I am at best a lousy editor.

Sitting down and generating content is not a huge issue for me. Editing that same content often seems like a task I cannot complete.

If you were to ask me why, the answer I would give you is that it is boring, non-creative, and does not result in noticeable changes.  But if I am honest, those are all cop-outs.  The real reason is that I am lazy about it - so it should not be a surprise that I struggle with editing my life as well.

If I look at what McKeown has written, I suspect my biggest challenges are 1) I too often do not understand what the actual message is supposed to be (versus what I make it to be; and 2) Inability to cut options (which, as long-time readers know, I have struggled with immensely).

I do note that editing also takes time, which means that one has to plan one's finished product accordingly - for example, if I want to edit a post, likely I need to start writing them far more in advance than I do (which I really should be doing, to be fair).  Likewise in life, I need to see things out a bit further in order to start the editing to get there now.

I am not perfect at this- but I am far better than I was two years ago.