Rules for editing

Bridge in HDR. Click through to see full size on Flickr.

"There are two rules for editing. The first rule is to edit ruthlessly."

I've always liked that one. It's too easy to get enamored of our words and find that we can't part with a single one of them. I do it all the time. It's probably a carry-over of a bad habit from school where written projects had to be X number of pages. I hated writing in school, so wordiness, redundancy, and other bad things took hold.

I learned another rule from my friend Brian, who edited a local cycling newsletter once upon a time. "If you're going to write for public consumption," he said, "You have to be thick-skinned." Was he ever right! I've learned to be thick-skinned, and dismissive of trolls, tools, and fools. Why waste time and energy on them?

So it was with a sense of wonder that I saw this post on the Digital Photo School site, advising those of us who are (ahem) packrats to delete ruthlessly. Not that I'm a packrat, of course. Not me.