I'm pretty sure that in general in all my writing for the last decade (at least) I used more words then necessary. The desire or obsession for clarity an illness. The more words I used the more muddy the waters.

Now, I'm reading Carver and Hemmingway and Russell Banks and John Barth. (Okay -  I am late to the party but what the hell.) Spare spare spare. Lorrie Moore doesn't use many words. 

At any rate, I'm looking to try to make the writing less.  

Less strident, less insistent. I want a prose fiction that reflects simply and clearly how a thing happened, could happen, might happen so that the words on the page create a total effect that triggers a response as close as possible to the original moment which triggered its own response.

Action - emotion...a Freitag's triangle (because after all the story, the drama, is not just out there in the world, outside of the observer. Basic physics tells us this, we observe, the thing observed is changed and so on... A drama is not a thing in itself. It exists only as/only because of an interaction between events which appear to occur outside of and separate from the observing self - a complete delusion that distinction - but I digress.) A Frietag's triangle then, drawing a line between (or through) the action, (the thing in the world) to the observer, (the drama leaves the page, it's nook of space/time, whatever) passes through the observer, illiciting a response, lingering, creating it's own effect/impact eventually leading to story...the (re)creation of the facsimile of the original action.

All of which is only a decoding or an attempt at decoding what that original impetus was which prompted the internal emotion so sharp and clear.

Hemmingway said:

I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, or had been taught to feel, was to put down what actually happened in action: what the actual things were which produced the emotion you experienced. 

Isn't that the truth? All I can say now is that burying it all under so many words doesn't feel like it gets me any closer to anything accurate, truthful. Thinking so was a grave error.

I want to write it, relay it, without the filtering of applying so many labels to each word. All those adjectives and adverbs (worst of all) with their snooty likes and dislikes, constantly mediating the experience. Picking and choosing endlessly.

Can the experiences not stand on their own? We'll see. It'll either work or it won't. Stay tuned sports fans.