Writing is an amazing human invention.
It’s like ESP. Or Mr. Spock’s Vulcan Mind Meld.
“My mind to your mind. My thoughts to your thoughts.”
Stephen King says in his essay, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, “Writing is telepathy.”
I can take what is in my mind and encode it.
And then you can take that code, decode it, interpret it, and then understand precisely—or imprecisely, depending on my writing skill—what I’ve been thinking.
That’s why I feel it’s so important as we write to try to preserve and convey the thoughts in our minds as clearly and accurately as possible.
Good writing doesn’t just transfer data, but feelings, images, colors, texture.
You can smell good writing. You can taste it. You can hear and see it.
It can make you laugh or cry. It can enrage you. It can cause you pain.
And, yes, it can heal you.
Likewise, good editing doesn’t mean chopping out every unnecessary word, hacking a piece down to the bare bone. That’s not good editing. That’s injury.
It might even be mayhem or murder.
The writer is trying to bring life into their work. Their own life. In doing so, they are trying to bring you into their life.
So don’t kill it.