i can’t really articulate in general terms but i did find an example recently. (i wrote these out as examples in the writing log i kept while i was at this residency.)

this is from The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, a book about the Vietnam War:

If Rat told you, for example, that he’d slept with four girls one night, you could figure it was about a girl and a half. It wasn’t a question of deceit. Just the opposite: he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation.

what i love about this paragraph, this whole book really, is that it has a strong sense of voice. the humor of “a girl and a half.” the fragment of “just the opposite” and the placement of “i think.” there’s a rhythm here. to me it reads as though every word was chosen because every other word was considered and dismissed.

next i attempted to read Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, which is also about the Vietnam War. here’s a paragraph that happens a few pages into the book that was so bad i put the book down and never picked it back up:

Bass handed him some coffee in an empty C-ration fruit cocktail can and then poured another can for Hamilton, who had dumped his radio in front of his and Mellas’s hooch and was sitting on it. Hamilton took the coffee, raised the can to Bass in toast, and wrapped his fingers around the can to warm them.

this paragraph from Matterhorn is littered with unnecessary descriptive adjectives among bodily action that’s not needed and serves only to show the detail of the C-ration fruit cocktail can. that information is better placed elsewhere, where it might be more relevant and interesting to the narrator. there is no tension in this paragraph. it’s only bodily direction as if in a film, and because this is prose, that’s not needed unless it’s relevant to the conflict. in this case, the conflict is that our narrator, Mellas, is absolutely terrified and trying to scheme however he can to get out of the combat zone. but do you get any sense of that urgency in this paragraph? no, it’s just things happening.

i think good writers (and i use that term loosely, because we all determine good writing based on our personal tastes and the art/media we’ve encountered in our lives thus far) draft these kinds of sentences for the sake of knowing where their characters are in time and space but eventually cut them, even if they love the image of the C-ration fruit cocktail can. but if you love the C-ration fruit cocktail can, you can lend it meaning. you can honor it by making it matter to the narrator. here it’s just kind of thrown in along with the other details, like a valuable antique thrown into a pile of junk. that antique deserves to sit on a shelf and be admired.

maybe the C-ration fruit cocktail can arrives in drafting totally on its own. in revision–when you’re going through the pile of junk looking for valuable things–is when you find it again and go, “oh, this is good, i need this.” you know so much about your story that you know how to find what’s valuable, what sings. so when i say that in TTTC every word was chosen because every other word was considered and dismissed, what i’m saying is that O'Brien meticulously went through that pile, found the good stuff, and put it on the shelf in a beautiful way.

that’s where creative skill comes from, i think. the endurance to consider, to make millions of little choices meaningfully.