"So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?"
About this Quote
Nelson’s complaint lands with the petulance of a perfectionist and the precision of a systems thinker: why should expression be a zero-sum game? On the surface it’s a writer’s gripe about drafts and deletions. Underneath, it’s an argument against the scarcity model baked into older media. Paper has margins, publishers have page counts, readers have patience. The “have to” in his sentence is the tell: he’s not lamenting the pain of editing so much as refusing the premise that anyone gets to impose limits on thought.
That refusal makes sense coming from Ted Nelson, the godfather of hypertext who spent decades imagining documents as living, interlinked networks rather than sealed containers. In that context, “cut things” isn’t just trimming adjectives; it’s amputating pathways. Traditional writing forces you to choose one line of argument, one order, one version. Nelson’s worldview treats those choices as needless violence. Why not keep the aside, the alternative phrasing, the footnote that grows into a new essay? Why not let readers traverse ideas the way minds actually do: associatively, recursively, with detours that aren’t “wasted” but generative?
The subtext also pokes at authority. Editing is often framed as craft, but it’s also gatekeeping: what gets removed to satisfy a market, a format, an institution. Nelson’s question is rhetorical, almost utopian, but it’s not naive. It recognizes that constraints produce elegance while asking who benefits from calling those constraints “necessary.” In an age of infinite scroll and version history, his frustration reads less like whining than prophecy.
That refusal makes sense coming from Ted Nelson, the godfather of hypertext who spent decades imagining documents as living, interlinked networks rather than sealed containers. In that context, “cut things” isn’t just trimming adjectives; it’s amputating pathways. Traditional writing forces you to choose one line of argument, one order, one version. Nelson’s worldview treats those choices as needless violence. Why not keep the aside, the alternative phrasing, the footnote that grows into a new essay? Why not let readers traverse ideas the way minds actually do: associatively, recursively, with detours that aren’t “wasted” but generative?
The subtext also pokes at authority. Editing is often framed as craft, but it’s also gatekeeping: what gets removed to satisfy a market, a format, an institution. Nelson’s question is rhetorical, almost utopian, but it’s not naive. It recognizes that constraints produce elegance while asking who benefits from calling those constraints “necessary.” In an age of infinite scroll and version history, his frustration reads less like whining than prophecy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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