Less Is More: That's Victoria's Secret
BY ERIKA HOFFMAN
Psst! Any Victoria’s Secret model can testify that less is more. Less clothing; more ogling. Less caloric intake; more ogling. Less talk (only strut); more ogling.
Writers are admonished constantly that less is more. Less backstory, more page-flipping. Less punctuation, more flow. Less flowery purple prose, more readership. Brevity!
Today, this mantra of less is more is in vogue. Think minimalist house-décor or the Swedish Death Cleaning Method. Or “X”—not many characters/letters allowed to present your argument. Yet, simplicity has been in style before. Henry David Thoreau, a follower of Transcendentalism, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, preached simplicity. In fact, Thoreau set up camp at Walden Pond, forsaking the comforts of home and hearth because he wanted to learn to live simply, to survive without modern conveniences, such as those were in the nineteenth century.
Abe Lincoln’s pithy two-minute Gettysburg Address is still quoted and memorized. No one remembers the two-hour-long speech delivered by Secretary of State Edward Everett that same day on that same stage. It’s been completely forgotten.
Solomon said: “He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.” Having more doesn’t sate folks.
Advice to hoarders is to keep only those things that give them joy or serve a purpose. I have a closet full of clothes (half of which don’t fit) shoes and sandals (most are way out of style) and robes, hats, scarves, gloves and costume jewelry of which I ask why in the world would sane people ever adorn themselves with any of it, let alone spend hard cash on buying it in the first place.
Yet, sentimentality and inertia have saddled me with the hoarder’s prognosis—a mess! I can’t locate anything I really want to wear— let alone find it in a timely manner on the day needed or even locate it— before the appropriate season for its use ends.
One day I’d had enough. I took three boxes and labeled them: Keep, Toss, and Give Away. I toted that first large box of throw-aways to the street on garbage day and skipped back up the driveway. The box of slightly used apparel I hurled into my car’s trunk and delivered it to the local PTA Thrift Shop. A smile spread over my face as I saw a woman peeking through the load as I sauntered out, with hands free. The keepers in my third box I hung on new matching hangers and arranged them to face in the same direction after I had color-coded them.
The next day I repeated the 1-2-3 box method. And then again on the third day. My life began to resemble the movie Groundhog Day where Bill Murray wakes each morning to go through each day the same way as the previous one but improving the events a bit each time he repeated them. Progress.
At week’s end, I took a deep breath as I felt a Zen moment, standing in my walk-in closet and seeing bare floor below my feet and around my feet while overhead I spied neatly organized hues of blouses and skirts.
Less junk, more closet space. Less annoyance, more peace. Less mess, more freedom. Less stress, more happiness. Quality not quantity or in other words: Less is more.
Gone are the days when a writer, like Dickens, could segue into subplot after subplot to raise the word count, thereby increasing his pay. Gone are the days when folks, like the Victorians, read novels for their main entertainment. Gone are the days when editors like Maxwell Perkins existed, who honed and hewed Thomas Wolfe's lengthy and rhapsodic manuscripts down to a readable size from their original encyclopedia-like girth. Gone with the wind are encyclopedias or other tomes of that girth! That reminds me: Think anyone today would ply through Gone with the Wind?
Fellow scriveners, reduce your word count! Learn Victoria's Secret: Fewer clothes worn means more eyeballs gazing. Fewer words on the page mean more eyeballs reading. Less flowery verbiage means writing in a more deliberate, powerful, purposeful way. Toss the frou-frou, the tchotchkes, and the antimacassars. Purge! There’s a reason graphic novels are popular. Fewer words.
Erika Hoffman is a happy and long-term resident of beautiful North Carolina. She’s a member of three writing clans: North Carolina Writers Network; The Triangle Area Freelancers; and Carteret Writers. During the past 15 years she’s been pursuing “her scrivener dream,” she has succeeded in getting published 580 times. Often, she teaches an OLLI class on penning personal narratives at her alma mater, Duke University. Although Erika taught in public high schools, which takes perseverance, a sense of humor, and intestinal fortitude, Erika deems her best achievement, besides being married forever, is having raised four functioning citizens. Without a doubt, her proudest moniker is “Ama’ to six grandsons and four granddaughters. She also cherishes the nomenclature, “favorite mother-in-law,” by three wonderful people as well as being designated as a “good friend” to cherished, lifelong, genuine buddies.