I was editing a paragraph and remembered what I once read from another writer about how you can only keep what’s essential. Remembering this, I sculpted the paragraph with hungry scrapes. With each scrape, I asked myself, “Is this essential?” And the answer was always no. I would look at a whole clause, answer no, and delete it all. The paragraph started as, I don’t know, maybe ten or fifteen lines. And I kept backspacing and backspacing and the paragraph was down to about five lines. And then I asked myself the same question, “Is this essential?” And I wanted to say yes, but the answer was still no. And I thought to myself,  there is not much of this paragraph left. If I take out too much, it will cease to be itself. And then the paragraph will be more like a creation of the editing itself, and none of the original creation will be left—which could be said, I am realizing now, of even the first touch of editing as well. Only a virgin piece of writing, as it was born and unmolested by editing, is real. All else is editing. But still, I was asking myself, “Where is the essential?” Say I take this paragraph down to three lines, and then two, one. Will I be getting any closer? And on that last line: I take out the punctuation, I abbreviate each word, I take out the spaces. What if somehow I could get down to one letter? And then what? I was not taught in school about how to edit one letter. Or, maybe I was. I learned in art class about how to change what I was seeing. Not just the brute binary of add and subtract; art class was about seeing the void in the middle. And in that void lies the answer to how to edit a single letter. Think of any letter in your mind. Do you see it? Okay good. Now think of your letter as a drawing. Draw it and erase it. Once you have done that a couple of times, now start to remove as much of the letter as possible, while still being able to identify the letter as itself. Once you have gone as far as you can, now you can break the rule about identifying the letter as itself. What does it become? A slanted line? A circle? Even simpler—a straight line. And simpler—a dot. And then what? I do not know what, or when. But I am pretty sure that is where the essential will be.