I don’t think I’ve ever written this down before.
Widows and orphans is actually a term from typography, a system to ensure a paragraph isn’t split across two pages. I borrowed the term to describe for myself what is one of the worst processes in writing for me.
When you’re asked to write a piece at a certain page count – like the one-page pitches I turned in today – you need to hit that count. A page-and-a-bit pitch makes you look like a slob at best, and an idiot at worst. When they ask for one page, you give them one page.
The first draft is almost never one page long. So it’s widows and orphans time.
Those paragraphs that end up with one word on its own on a line? That word’s an orphan. You need to rewrite that paragraph so that there’s not one word on its own taking up a line, because you need to buy back that line’s worth of space. This is usually a technical thing – clean up a few lines and the orphan will be back in the family. If you’re lucky, capturing your orphans will be enough to get you inside the page break and you won’t have to make any widows. But you’re a writer, so you’re never that lucky.
Widows, because sometimes you must kill your darlings. That one sentence you really like, that does its job in the piece perfectly? You know it’s too long, right? You have to find another way to say that, that uses fewer words and operates more efficiently but still has style and snap. Sometimes you have to make a lot of widows. Sometimes making the widows takes longer than it did to write the original document.
But when someone calls for a certain length, you’ve got to run the widows and orphans on it. All day. All week, if you have to. what it teaches you is to revise and revise again, and find a balance between energetic language and clear concise language.
And then sometimes you say fuck it, reduce the type size by one point instead, and go and have a drink.
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