Writing A Book

I've spent the past few years writing a book. It is complete at 295 pages.

Since it was a memoir, I found it especially challenging to decide what to leave out, but I had no shortage of material to put in.

In the end, I simply say I left two books worth of material on the cutting room floor. If I wrote everything that happened, everything I thought was interesting, the book would have been 900 pages.

I followed the advice of William Zinsser, and cut at least one third of my words during editing.

Zinsser says in his excellent book On Writing Well: "writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it".