"Reality offers us such a wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should? ... We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole." Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004)
Same with writing. If you don't make the cuts, if you don't revise, the whole suffers. If you keep everything, you end up with nothing.
You have to "murder your darlings" (G K Chesterton). Invariably, those passages where you are thrilled with the language, and yourself, are the ones an editor will want to axe. (How do they know??) They seem to leap off the page at them. Perhaps it's that you got in the way and stopped serving the story and started showing off?
"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary that the necessary make speak" Hans Hoffman
Have this on my desk to remind me. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.
