Note to self, look up the origins of the phrase, “The tall and the short of it.” This was one of those rare times when I completely had it wrong.
There is no such phrase. Correctly, the phrase is “the long and the short of it.”
Okay, that changes things, or does it? This should really be the editor’s motto because it is a noun phrase that means that you’re making a brief statement telling only the most important parts of something.
That’s what an editor does. We slash long passages of prose from wordy originals into concise and to the point masterpieces – or so we think.
I am an editor in my day job. Specifically, I edit front and back matter in collections of music and sometimes the body of longer books, with lots of prose.
When I’m editing someone else’s work it’s relatively easy to see the forest from the trees and cut out all of the “extra” material in order to let the most important parts stand out and shine. The writer or owner of that material thinks every tree in the entire forest is important or it just isn’t the forest that they know and love.
My second job, and frankly my favorite one is as an essayist. An essayist is probably by definition, verbose and the bane of an editor. We do like to elaborate. There are lots of trees in our forest, and of many varieties.
My work is therefore a contradiction in terms and from time to time is reflected in my columns. I’m getting better at self-editing but once in a while I’m compelled to go on and on, impressed with one idea after another.
For example, a good editor would probably have slashed my first paragraph describing how I started this column idea with an erroneous assumption about a non-existent phrase. This is not important material. However, it’s interesting material to an essayist.
This essayist will tell you something I find interesting albeit not important. I don’t think interesting things are necessarily unimportant, even though they are often completely random. For instance, why do you think I mixed up the tall and the short of it with the long and the short of it?
Tall and short, fat and skinny, manic and depressive, big and small… are all on a spectrum of extremes. I suppose that makes average or normal, the standard, maybe even the goal. But I’m increasingly not sure that’s my goal in life.
Freud would probably say I have a problem with being short, or brief or concise or even average. I want to tell the long story and avoid making the long story short, if I can. It’s not as much fun.
You’ve seen the image of a domestic kitten looking into a mirror, seeing a lion looking back at him. Well, this editor looks into a mirror and sees an essayist looking back at me. Or maybe more colorfully and with my lame attempt at a walked into a bar joke, an editor walks into a bar, drinks too many words, gets happy drunk on ideas, and comes out an essayist.
They say that if a hiker crosses the path of a bear, you should stand as tall as you can, look big, and ominous. Look as bog-footy as you can. That’s what that kitten-to-lion does in his mirror.
When you’re encouraging someone to “stand tall,” you’re telling them to stretch, have courage, go forth, and conquer. This is proven to work in the form of the fake smile. If you’re sad or having a bad day and you force or fake a smile, the very act of the smile articulation causes a surge of happy hormones.
Usually in the end, both sides of my writing personality conjoin and I present a work that you can and want to read in less than an afternoon. Sometimes that may be a tall order, or even a tall tale, but one thing I won’t give you is short shrift.
I would wager that editors sleep better than essayists. This essayist slept two hours then awakened thinking, “I need to work on that ‘standing tall’ column.” When six a.m. rolled around, some research was completed and the long and the short of it never materialized, but a nice million-word essay developed.
Perhaps tomorrow night the editor will get her essential eight hours of sleep, satisfied that the most important material was covered and the point made. She kept the word count reasonable and she cut out a few of the fun puns that the essayist originally wanted really badly to include.
There was a sacrifice made to make the long and the short of it. But she looks in the mirror and, in the end, it turns out she’s standing tall after all.