Is this the best you can do?

Winston Lord was an aide to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon administration. Once, after Lord had written a draft report, Kissinger asked “Is this the best you can do?” Disheartened, Lord took the report away and redrafted it. Again Kissinger sent it back, saying “Are you sure this is the best you can do?”

He submitted another eight drafts, getting exactly the same reaction each time. Finally, he sent in a ninth. Kissinger called him into his office and asked again, “Is this the best that you can do?”

Lord, by this stage, was more than a little frustrated. He replied “Henry, I’ve beaten my brains out – this is the ninth draft. I know it’s the best I can do: I can’t possibly improve one more word.”

Kissinger looked up from his desk, “In that case,” he said, “now I’ll read it.”

Kissinger sets a bad example for management, but a good example for writing.

Moving complicated ideas from one head to another is hard work. Someone always has to sweat and struggle over it. If you don’t do the hard work when you write, you are leaving it to your reader. The problem is that your reader may not bother.

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.