Ben Folds: You don’t end up with a 140,000 word book that you end up cutting down, you actually get there.
Nick Hornby: Right. I always underwrite, for a start. And it’s when I’m reading it back and doing a second draft, it gets longer, not shorter, because I can see that I’ve taken jumps and I’m not, maybe, taking the reader with me in those jumps, and that needs filling in.
from Lightning Bugs with Ben Folds
I think we hear a lot about the opposite: the idea of getting all your ideas out in their most maximalist form, and then sifting away what’s not needed. Call it the Michelangelo Approach. (He famously described sculpting as removing everything that didn’t belong.)
I like Nick Hornby’s approach just as much. Get it down in what feels like a clear, concise form, and then find where the skips are, and fill them in. It’s an effective creative process, and one different from the one that’s often encouraged. I certainly found, as I wrote my book, that each draft got longer, as I found the spots where my explanations would lose readers. I added whole chapters, sometimes, to clarify the reader’s journey.