Kurt Pankau Dot Com

💰 It's the Economy, Stupid... It's funny what gets lodged in your brain. There's a line from the Steven Soderbergh movie Ocean's 11  that I find myself coming back to frequently. It's just before the start of Act 3, when Rusty (Brad Pitt) is prepping Linus (Matt Damon) for his role in the heist. One of the pieces of advice he gives is "Don't use seven words when four will do." And this stuck with me, not because it was particularly important to that scene, but just because it felt like, I dunno... solid life advice? So naturally it found its way into my philosophy about writing, and that's why we... Edit For Economy Second Way back in my post about Writing to a Word Count , I talked about economy in writing, and how the idea of "word-economy" stays forefront in my mind while drafting and editing. Word-economy isn't about using the fewest  words, it's about making the most effective use of your words. The idea goes back (like eve

☀️ I Can See All Obstacles in my Way... Bit of housekeeping up at the top here: I have indeed burned through more material than I'd expected in the first quarter of the year, so I'm going to be dropping back to one post every other week for at least a little while. The editorial board apologizes for any inconvenience. Edit For Clarity First "Editing" is one of those terms that is used to cover so many bases that it has almost become meaningless. The person who buys stories, the person who helps develop stories, the person who checks spelling and punctuation, the person who checks for continuity, the person who looks at word choice and sentence structure--all of these people have "editor" in their job title. So needs must that we hone in on one, and over the next few posts, I'm going to be looking at my favorite of these: line-editing. Or "wordsmithing," if you like. Now, most authors find line-editing to be a chore. I love it. I love it so muc