Book Report: The Ten-Percent Solution

A Review of Ken Rand's Cat-Rambo-Endorsed Chronicle of Conciseness

I’m calling this a “book report” instead of a “book review” because “book report” has connotations of a third-grader just trying their best (me) and “book review” has connotations of a serious opinion printed in the New York Times (Michiko Kakutani).

I know I’m always saying “I have a funny story about that” and it’s probably getting old but here’s my funny story about Michiko Kakutani: When I was in college one of my professors who I admire very much burst out one day with, “I can’t stand Michiko Kakutani!” who was at that time a (famously harsh) literary critic at the New York Times. This does not give away my age because Michiko Kakutani held that position for like thirty years. Anyway, I asked, “Why?” and my professor said, “Ugh, he’s such an arrogant jerk. He thinks he knows everything!” and I said, “But Professor, Michiko Kakutani is a woman” and she (my professor) paused thoughtfully and then said, “Oh. Then I like Michiko Kakutani after all.”

Friends, I didn’t see a heel/face turn that abrupt again until this year of our Lorde 2022 when we all found out brow hero Anastasia Soare is pro-Putin. Alexa, remind me to write a later Shelf Life on heel/face turns.

Here’s a funny story about giving away my age: If you’re reading Shelf Life today (big if), then I got it together even after being pretty sick on the day I had to actually write it, on account of I ate junk food all day, which is a thing you cannot do anymore when you’re forty. As it happens, my birthday is Friday and so on the positive side I will no longer be forty after that; however, I don’t think the “eating whatever I feel like” situation will improve. 

Today we’re doing a new thing in Shelf Life, a book report. I want to read more books on craft of writing (doing the study portion of Study and Experience) although, as I have often written, I’m not always great at motivating myself to read and worse at reading nonfiction. For a while I’ve had an idea to read books on writing craft and review them here so anyone reading can decide if the book might be a good read for them, too. But like I said, I haven’t been on top of my nonfiction reading.

Now—and I promise this is related—I’ve also been having trouble placing a short story that I believe in. It’s been through a lot of rejections even after feedback editors/critique partners and several revisions. I still think there’s a home for this manuscript somewhere but I’ve not had luck finding it.

I’m a patron of sci fi writer and editor Cat Rambo and I learned through their Patreon that they were opening the books for editing and manuscript critiques so I thought I’d see if another round of feedback might do the trick. (If you’re unclear on what I mean by a patron of Cat’s Patreon, check out Tuesday’s Shelf Life.)

Cat delivered, as I knew they would, and among their feedback was that the story could benefit from “ruthless tightening,” that is, to winnow down from its starting length of around 5500 words to something in the 4000-word range. They recommended I read The Ten-Percent Solution by Ken Rand (available on Amazon Kindle and in paperback) for guidance on the kind of tightening and streamlining they meant. I was already committed to reading it before I saw it was only 70 pages long and that cemented it for me because short books are my favorite kind.

Also, Ken Rand fit a whole writing advice book that Cat Rambo endorses into 70 pages so I think that speaks for his expertise on conciseness.

I’m not concise, which you already know. That said, you know (as I suspect Cat does not ) that I am an editor by trade, and specifically the type of editor who is trained to wade hip-deep into text, tear it down, and build it back up again more beautiful than it was before. So I said, “okay, if anybody can do ruthless tightening, it’s me.” 

I am great at doing that for anybody else’s text but I acknowledge I am only mediocre at doing the same for my own. I know why: It’s because I know what I meant when I wrote each word; in my heart of hearts I’m being concise, because I know every detail has purpose in the story. When I read another person’s work, without that esoteric knowledge or the means to scry it, I can zero in on everything the reader doesn’t need and cut it out. But I can never read my own work from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know the writer’s intent.

It’s a weakness for me, as good an editor as I am. So, I read the book—all 70 pages—in an evening, and then I even read some parts of it again because it was that helpful, and plus, Ken Rand took up so little of my available reading time with his very brief book that I had some leftover to go back and read parts again.

I’m not going to share his method here, obviously; you have to read his book to get that. But I’m going to give you my thoughts on the information contained therein and the methodology so you can decide for yourself whether to give it a shot (pro tip: you can’t lose).

First of all, the guidance in this book is highly actionable and has tremendous practical value. The author has created, essentially, an editing framework for writers to use with their own work in the form of specific steps to follow. First, you’ll do step 1, then step 2, then step 3, and so on.

Many texts by writers on writing have touchy-feely advice that doesn’t actually tell you how to do something. You know, like “show don’t tell.” There are ways to help writers learn to show instead of tell, but it doesn’t help anyone to say, “as a writer, try to show more and tell less.” That’s not actionable advice. This book is not like those books. This advice is clear and specific.

Ken Rand isn’t advising writers what edits to make to the text in order to reach conciseness nirvana but he provides specific guidance on how to find the places in your manuscript that are ripe for editing. There’s a list of red-flag syllables and words you can find in your text to alert you to the sentences that need another look. While he provides guidance and examples on how one might make these edits, there are no hard and fast rules about what to change. This is not the craft book that tells you to delete every adverb because adverbs are terrible (see The Silence of the Adverbs for more on that). You can get that (bad) advice from Grammarly for free.

As I read Rand’s book, I realized he was describing several things I do (ruthlessly, as it were) when I am editing someone else’s text but that I find challenging with my own. The framework is helpful because it puts those instances right in my face for scrutiny, whereas if I read my own work to edit the way I read another writer’s work to edit, my eyes want to glide right over my weak points.

I will wrap up this part of the report by saying I am in process of applying Mr Rand’s method to the short story I mentioned above. I’d hoped to finish before now so I could tell you how many words I ultimately cut, but I haven’t finished going through the methodology. I will report back on this when I’m done. However—spoiler alert—I’ve already tightened up significant portions of the text resulting in the word count diminishing steadily.

Another part of the book I found fascinating and informative was a discussion on the right brain/left brain division of labor in writing and editing. Right brain equals creative thought and left brain equals analytical thought. Writing requires creativity, editing requires an analytical approach. Rand talks about keeping this division of labor strict: Let your creative right brain go wild while you’re drafting and hold back your analytical left-brain from interrupting. And likewise, when you’re in your left-brain editing, don’t let the writerly right-brain veto the changes. Let each side of the brain have their time.

To expand slightly on Rand’s discussion of right- and left-brain tasks in drafting and editing text, consider that there’s some evidence supporting the theory that in most people, either the left or the right hemisphere of the brain is dominant over the other (check out this 2022 article by Li et al in Frontiers in Psychology, the literature review section is a good overview). This is where we get the concept of right-brain-dominant and left-brain-dominant individuals. I have to assume there are some individuals for whom there’s a close balance between both hemispheres but I’m an editor, not a neurologist, Jim, so I don’t know.

This got me thinking about our differing strengths and weaknesses (as writers); that is, someone who is right-brain-dominant may have an easier time with drafting than editing while someone who is left-brain-dominant may have an easier time with editing and struggle with shutting their inner editor up long enough to get the drafting done. Either way, you can use your personal strength to shore up your weakness. If you know it’s a breeze for you to lay down loads of words and harder to go back and edit them later, maybe—counter to advice I’m often giving in Shelf Life—it’s okay to slow yourself down and do a bit of editing as you go, because you’re not in danger of stalling yourself. Likewise, if drafting is the pits for you but editing is your flow state, then give yourself permission to just crank out trash. 

Nothing can’t be fixed in post.

Anyhow, I hope this book report was helpful for you and if you decide to pick up Rand’s book, let me know in the comments! Here’s a list of some other craft and craft-related books that are on my TBR pile and the subject of book reports to come. If you’re interested in any in particular, let me know and I can put them on top of the pile. 

• About Writing by Samuel Delany

• The Anatomy of Story by John Truby

• Around the Writer’s Block by Rosanne Bane

• Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott

• The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth

• From Idea to Story in 90 Seconds by Ken Rand (since I liked this one so much)

• Grammar for a Full Life by Lawrence Weinstein

• The Magic Words by Cheryl Klein

• Sin and Syntax by Constance Hale

• Story Engineering by Larry Brooks

• A Stranger’s Journey by David Mura

• Write Characters Your Readers Won’t Forget by Stant Litore

• Writing the Natural Way by Gabriele Lusser Rico (recommended in The Ten-Percent Solution)

• Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward

• Writing Short Stories by Courttia Newland and Tania Hershman

• Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark

That’s too many books, I’ve made myself tired thinking about reading all that. So definitely let me know of other titles I should add to the list. 

---

If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.