Daily Inspiration Quote by Harold Ross

It reads like a joke about craft, but it’s really an editor’s credo disguised as a Lardner quip. Ross isn’t admiring some mystical, muse-driven process; he’s spotlighting the brute mechanics behind “effortless” prose. The gag hinges on misdirection: you expect a reverent answer about inspiration and technique, and you get a deadpan method so stripped-down it borders on absurd. Widely separated words, then fill the gaps. Writing as connect-the-dots. The punchline is that it’s not entirely false.

Ross, as the founding editor of The New Yorker, built an empire on the idea that polish is manufactured, not bestowed. Lardner’s line flatters the myth of the naturally funny man while quietly endorsing an editor’s worldview: a story can be engineered from a few load-bearing phrases if the ear is sharp enough. Those “widely separated” words are the spine: the killer observations, the turns of voice, the bits you’d underline. Everything else is carpentry.

The subtext is also a swipe at literary pretension. Early 20th-century American letters loved to mystify authorship; Ross counters with something closer to newsroom pragmatism. You can almost hear the smoke, the clatter, the deadline. It’s a reminder that short stories, like magazines, are assembled: choose the moments that carry charge, then ruthlessly compress the connective tissue. The joke lands because it tells an uncomfortable truth about how much of style is selection, and how much of “genius” is revision.