There is a line in the third part of my book.
Words were cheap.
Now my tongue counts coins
before it spends a sentence.
I wrote it about grief. It has turned out to be a rule about work too.
I write functionally now. A clinic’s catalogue, a doctor’s story. Writing with a job to do. The reader is not there for me. She is a mother on a clinic’s website at 11 at night, and she is already tired.
In a poem, an extra word kills the line. On that clinic’s page, an extra sentence loses the mother.
The discipline is the same in both places. Count the coins. Spend a sentence only when it buys the reader something.
The book is called The Maths of Mercy. The maths, I eventually understood, is this.