Over the years, writing professors, editors and uptight journalists have tried their best to turn the art of writing into mathematics. It has become a talking point for uninspired editors and lecturers to “make every word serve a purpose,” as if sentences were Communist nations. Perhaps it thins their stack of papers to correct. Perhaps it’s easier to get their students to write from the brain instead of the heart.

Here’s an exercise. Let’s see what our literary canon would look like if we sent some of its gems through the hacksaw. Hemingway, you’re safe.

Allen Ginsberg — “Howl”

Original text:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

Dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix

Economical edit:

I saw my best generational minds starved and destroyed, seeking a fix on the streets.

F. Scott Fitzgerald — “The Great Gatsby”

Original text:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Economical edit:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the future that gradually disappears. No matter it eluded us then. Tomorrow we will improve. Then one morning … We continue, struggling boats brought backward.

Charles Dickens — “A Tale of Two Cities”

Original text:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Economical edit:
Times were good and bad.

Jane Austen — “Pride and Prejudice”

Original text:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Economical edit:
All people acknowledge that a single, rich man needs a wife.

Vladimir Nabakov — “Lolita”

Original text:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Economical edit:
I love Lolita.

James Joyce — “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

Original text:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

Economical edit:
Once a cow met a boy named tuckoo on the road.

Jack Kerouac — “On the Road”

Original text:
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Economical edit:
In the American night I think of Dean Moriarty.

–Mark Brenden

Photo by alsokaizen