Clearing the Clutter, Articles

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The Hidden Reef: Why Clutter Is Silently Sinking Your Writing

My wife and I love the ocean. When we were younger, we’d snorkel every week, exploring the vibrant world just beneath the waves. Now, we often just sit and watch the undulating blue surface of the Pacific. It’s beautiful, but I never forget that the real action—the life and the danger—is happening just a few feet down.

Sailors know the sea’s surface can be deceptive. Near the shore, hidden reefs wait to tear a hole in the hull of any unsuspecting vessel.

Your writing has its own hidden reefs. And the most dangerous one of all is clutter. It’s a quiet threat, one that can run your manuscript aground before it ever has a chance to set sail. Tolerating clutter isn’t just a stylistic choice; it's an act of self-sabotage that can sink your writing career. Here’s why it matters so much.

Reason 1: It Gets You Rejected by the Gatekeepers

Let’s start with the most pragmatic reason: agents and editors despise clutter. Imagine an acquisitions editor’s desk—or, more accurately today, their inbox. It’s a torrential flood of submissions. To survive, they must make decisions quickly. They are actively hunting for two things: something that grips them from the first sentence, and any problem that gives them a valid reason to say "no."

Clutter is the easiest “no” you can give them.

Producing a book is a costly and difficult venture. If a manuscript requires heavy editing and rewriting, those costs skyrocket. An editor will almost always pass on a needy project in the hopes that the next one in the pile will be cleaner, more professional, and require less heavy lifting. A cluttered manuscript signals to them that the author hasn't done the work.

Reason 2: It Alienates Your Most Important Audience—Readers

That first reason alone should be enough to make any writer sit up and pay attention. But there’s another, more fundamental one: cluttered writing is exhausting for readers.

During my graduate studies in theology, I was assigned a text by a well-respected, early-20th-century theologian. His knowledge was legendary, but it was buried in thick, intractable prose. Single paragraphs ran for five pages. Every sentence was a battle. My fellow students and I weren't gathering his gems of insight; we were forced to mine them from hard ground with a pickaxe. It was joyless work.

The result? All his wisdom and knowledge went unlearned and unappreciated.

Some writers operate under the misguided idea that "If I write it, they will read it." They won't. It is far easier for a reader to set a book down than it is to pick it up. Once set aside, a difficult book is rarely returned to. It becomes shelf decoration or a garage sale item marked "$1.00."

This leads to a business nightmare: negative word-of-mouth. Everyone in publishing agrees that positive word-of-mouth is the holy grail of advertising. But the reverse is also true. A book that leaves a lump in the reader's stomach gets talked about, too. "I couldn't get through it." "I had no idea what the author was getting at."

Worse yet, some readers will return the book for a refund. Those returns go straight back to the publisher, putting a real ding in your royalties and souring the publisher on the idea of giving you a contract for your next book.

The Crucial Question: When Should You Worry About It

I know this all sounds like doom and gloom. But here is the single most important piece of good news I can give you about clutter. Please, give me your full attention, because this is where so many writers go astray and fall into a trap.

The trap is the paralysis of analysis. We get so bound up in the details that we lose sight of the big picture and freeze. So, when should you worry about cutting the clutter?

Al’s Axiom #3: Don’t worry about clutter when writing your first draft. Obsess about it when you rewrite.

The first draft is not for public consumption. It is your private laboratory. It’s a place to experiment, to make a mess, to pour the story onto the page. The goal of a first draft is simply to get it done. Focus on character, plot, and theme. Forget about clutter. As Ernest Hemingway famously quipped, "Write drunk, edit sober." The point is to separate the creative act from the analytical one.

Many promising writers quit because they judge their first draft too harshly. Of course it's bad! Expecting a first draft to be polished is like expecting the raw ingredients you just mixed to taste like a fully cooked meatloaf.

Finish your first draft first. Celebrate it. Then, and only then, put on your editor’s hat and go to work. Rewriting is where you turn raw material into art. It's when you cut the clutter. It's not drudgery; it's like a musician finally getting to play a finely-tuned instrument.

By learning to see and eliminate clutter in the rewriting phase, you not only improve your work and build your reputation, but you also heighten your appreciation for the masters. You start to see the clean, concise, distraction-free prose that makes a story truly memorable. That’s how the magic happens.

Clear the Clutter #1: The Secret to Professional, Powerful Prose

Some years ago, a publisher introduced me to a new writer, a pastor from the south with a collection of insightful devotional thoughts. He had talent, intelligence, and a poet’s heart. His content was a gem. But there was a problem.

The writing, while full of wisdom, wasn't ready to go to press. It was my job to sort it, structure it, and—most importantly—improve the prose.

As I began editing his chapters, something wonderful happened. He wasn't just a client; he became a student. His questions grew keener, his insights sharper. By the time we finished the project, he had so thoroughly absorbed the practice of self-editing that he could fly on his own. The secret to his transformation wasn't learning complex new rules. It was learning what to take away.

He learned to clear the clutter.

Over more than two decades of writing, teaching at conferences, and editing for publishers and private clients, I’ve seen one problem snare writers of all levels, from nervous novices to seasoned pros. It’s the single most common disease in writing.

Clutter.

The Enemy in Our Prose

Clutter is the collection of unnecessary words, circular constructions, and pompous frills that dilute our meaning and bore our readers. As the great William Zinsser wrote in On Writing Well, “Clutter is the disease of American Writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words.”

Why do we do it? New writers often believe that more words mean better writing, that a higher word count somehow equates to stronger prose and more satisfied readers. We have a misconception that clutter-free writing will be seen as juvenile or simplistic, and our genius will be overlooked.

The opposite is true. The best writers go the extra mile to trim every unneeded word and phrase. Vigorous, professional writing isn't bloated; it's lean. It’s evidence of a writer who respects their message and, more importantly, their reader’s time. This leads to my first principle:

Al’s Axiom #1:
Writing is putting words on the page. Great writing is taking words off the page.

The Philosophy of “Less is More”

The masters of the craft have understood this for centuries. Mark Twain is famously credited with saying, “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”

The principle extends beyond just writing. It’s a philosophy of focused creation. As Albert Einstein advised, “Out of clutter, find simplicity.”

Perhaps no one articulated this for writers better than E.B. White in his classic, The Elements of Style:

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

Read that again. That every word tell. This is our goal. A passage like White’s is tight yet riveting. It needs no additions, and it suffers horribly if anything is taken away. He doesn’t just make the point; he proves it by example.

Cleaning Up the Construction Site

Reading a cluttered manuscript is like walking through an active construction site. You can see that something good is being built, but the ground is littered with leftover wood, stray bricks, and chunks of concrete. That’s what literary clutter is: the detritus of the creation process. It’s necessary while erecting the story, but it becomes debris once the structure is finished.

The last act of any good contractor is to clean the site, removing every piece of trash so the beauty of the building can shine through. The last act of the writer is to do the same.

Think of it another way. Imagine a mason who calculates he needs 1,000 bricks to build a perfect wall but insists on using 1,200. Where would the extra 200 bricks go? They would distort the wall, creating a faulty, amateurish structure. The professional uses only what is necessary to do the job.

It is the same for us. We are miners digging for diamonds. A diamond in the raw is unimpressive, but in the hands of a master jeweler, it becomes a coveted treasure. The jeweler doesn’t add to the stone; they skillfully chip away the imperfections to add facets that refract the light. Finding the diamond in your first draft is only the beginning. Making it shine requires taking things away.

Clutter-Free Writing is Literary Self-Defense

If the artistic argument isn't enough, consider the practical one. Getting an agent or a publisher is brutally competitive. Agents and acquisitions editors are buried under a mountain of submissions. Years ago, I stood in one of my editor's cubicles, surrounded by nearly twenty teetering piles of manuscripts. Today, the piles are digital, but the volume is even greater.

These gatekeepers are looking for a reason to say no. They must make decisions in minutes, not hours. If your manuscript is poorly edited and choked with clutter, you’ve given them the easiest reason to reject it and move on.

But if the writing is engaging, clean, and distraction-free… they pause. They read on. They love a writer who has done the hard work of editing. They love a manuscript free of clutter because it shows professionalism and respect for the craft. In this light, cleaning your manuscript is an essential act of career preservation.

Al’s Axiom #2:
Cleaning your manuscript of clutter is literary self-defense.

This isn't drudgery. If you love words and story, then taking a page from good to great is the most exhilarating fun you can have. This is where the real magic happens—not in the frenzied first draft, but in the focused, fine-tuning of the edit.

It’s time to leap in.

Your First Step: Open your current work-in-progress. Go to a single page and read it aloud. Your goal is simple: cut 10% of the words on that page without losing any of the meaning. You’ll be amazed at how much stronger, clearer, and more professional it becomes.

(Drawn from Alton Gansky’s CLEARING THE CLUTTER, Chapter 1)