BONUS: 3 Ways to Use Brevity to Make Your Work (and Self) More Powerful

What budgets, reactions, and the right verbs can do for your writing and life

Richard Wildbur said, “One of the jobs of poetry is to make the unbearable bearable by clear, precise confrontation.” And I would argue brevity does the same.

Brevity is ruthless. It acts as a sharp blade, making a clean cut to the exact thing we want to say. It is a careful and critical editor and audience, asking us to be precise in our message, intentional in our emotions, and merciless with our adjectives. I like to use the analogy that using brevity is like doing less reps with heavier weights to get better results. 

This Sunday, The Creative Crossover is hosting its first workshop, Brevity Bootcamp: How to Say More with Less, on Sunday, 10/29 from 2-5 pm PT. Replay available. 

Below are 3  ways to use brevity to make your work more powerful. Upgrade to a paid subscription to learn 7 more ways to tighten and trim your work for maximum impact. 

1. Give yourself a budget. 

It sounds obvious, right? I mean, it’s called word economy for a reason. Economic means “justified in terms of profitability.” Not to get all Capitalistic about it buuuuut….Think about each word as expensive. If you only have 100 words to spend, is each word justified? Does the writing profit from it? 

Brevity Budget Writing Exercise: 

• Write about someone you love—your mom, your spouse, your dog—for five minutes. Make sure to use specific examples to show who they are, so the reader gets a crystal clear picture. I love the prompt: “They are the type of person who…” For example: They are the type of mom your friends visit even if you're not around. They are the type of person who collects sand from every beach they visit. 

• Now, write about the person or thing you love only using 100 words pulled from your five-minute free write. 

Guarantee, hand to heart, that only the best, the most distilled, the concentrated stuff makes it into the 100 you choose. Patricia Smith uses this technique when writing a poem; she writes six pages about an event and then distills it into one (tiny) poem that usually can fit on a single page. 

Using a budget adds restraint and puts pressure on the work, helping it become urgent, tighter. How can you try to make your reader feel crimson anger or stomach-dropping sadness in 100 words? What is the one thing you absolutely have to say? 

Brevity Budget Life Exercise:

• Think of something you normally do and cut it in half. For example: Pick only 5 photos instead of 10 for your next Instagram post. If you are having friends over for dinner, what are two super strong dishes you can make instead of an appetizer, main, and two sides?

• Ask yourself how the impact of these things varied. Can you fit more flavor or more complexity into less? How can you express what you feel more succinctly to have a greater impact? 

2. Turn your Tells into Psychical Reactions 

We have all heard the old worn-out phrase Show, Don’t Tell. What this really means is that we want to see a person, or the world, react. If we are stuck inside a character, or a metaphor, or a movie, and nothing changes over the course of it, it doesn’t make for a very exciting audience experience. Sartre said, “We are our choices.” So, how someone responds to what happens to them tells a lot more about them than what has initially happened. 

There are scenes that stick with us because the character/speaker did (or didn’t do) something as simple as stand-up or stay silent. In Taylor Swift's “Blank Space,” she sets her lover's clothes on fire before throwing them out the window. In Dead Poets Society, when Professor Keating is fired, each student one by one, stomps onto their desk saluting “Oh, Captain my Captain!” It is often the reaction to the feeling, not the feeling itself, that speaks the loudest.

Brevity Reaction Writing Exercise:

• Take a part of the piece you are working on and identify a place where you are telling. 

• Write down 5 possible (and unexpected) things that the subject/speaker could do to show their emotion instead of telling us. Make these reactions wide and varied. 

• Take the most potent one you have and work it into the piece of writing. How has it changed? Is there anything you can now cut because of its presence? 

Brevity Reaction Life Exercise:

• Think about something you want to express to someone. How can you express it with a single reaction? This might mean writing them a love note in the mirror as a response to something they did, deciding to take space from social media, or taking out the trash when it isn’t your turn. Think about how you feel and the reaction you can use to express that feeling. 

3. Put Pressure on Your Verbs

A story, poem, or even a photo, is only as strong as its verbs.