42 You Have a Book in You A Writing Secret from Jimmy Breslin 吀栀e late Jimmy Breslin may have been the last of what were once called newspapermen. 吀栀at is, someone who takes taxis around a big city at all hours of the night and is known to every driver, who hangs out with o昀昀- duty detectives in smoke- 昀椀lled bars, and who manages to make every deadline for his daily column, if only at the last minute. 吀栀at’s Jimmy Breslin, who for many years was a col- umnist in New York and was the author of several inter- esting novels and at least one biography. Sometimes Breslin would give advice to others who, like him, had chosen the writing profession. Although his 昀椀rst piece of advice (“Ask for more money”) doesn’t deal with the process of writing itself, Breslin also came up with an extremely useful insight for writing well. It’s actually very simple. When you’ve written a sentence, pause for a second and challenge yourself to take one word out of the sentence without changing the meaning. You may 昀椀nd that it doesn’t actually improve when you do this, in which case you can just leave it as it was. But almost always the sentence will improve— and the time it takes to do the “extraction” will translate into time saved later on, when your book is in the edit- ing process.