Engineering by Subtraction

What Editing Taught Me About Writing, Healing, and Sharing

When I first started writing, my goal was to get everything out: every truth, every memory, every lesson. Now I’m finding that clarity comes from subtraction, not addition, and that connection can grow in the spaces we leave open.

I spent a year writing my memoir. By accident.

It started as a whim, after a brutal five years that began with the loss of five family members in a plane crash, continued through the COVID pandemic while my husband worked on the front lines, and culminated in my oldest son’s adolescent spiral that led us to send him across the country for residential treatment. Somewhere in there, I unraveled too, slipping into a relapse of anorexia I didn’t see coming.

My point isn’t to rehash all of that. If you’ve been here a while, you already know. I share it only so you understand what drove me to start writing.

During those years, I wasn’t alone. I had my family, an army of loving friends, and a lot of therapy. Though I’m a psychotherapist myself, I was also a part-time patient: weekly individual therapy, biweekly couples therapy, and, once our son left for treatment, family therapy and parent coaching.

When I finally sat down to write, I was just emerging from that half-decade of grief and growth. I had learned more about myself in five years than I had in the previous thirty-five, but it all felt tangled in my head. I hadn’t written outside of academia since high school, yet I felt pulled to get my story on the page. Not for anyone else, but to make sense of it. I wanted to see the pieces laid out, to understand how they fit.

And once I started, I didn’t stop. I wrote one page a day for more than three hundred days, usually about thirty minutes at a time. It changed me.

Before I knew it, I had a memoir on my hands, or at least a lot of words about my life. It made sense to me, but I had no idea whether it would make sense to anyone else. Tentatively, I shared it with a friend, another psychologist. Her feedback was hard to hear but necessary. So I edited. A lot.

Eventually, I decided it was good enough to query agents. That process is not for the faint of heart. It involved a stack of rejections and one meaningful yes (Not All Rejections Are Created Equal).

Two months ago, I signed with an agent I trust deeply. She’s helping me shape this book into something that I hope can meet readers where they are. And that, I’m realizing, requires a different kind of work.

When I wrote the first version, I was writing to understand myself. Now, I’m writing to connect with others. The work is no longer about putting everything in. It’s about knowing what to leave out.

That’s what this stage is: engineering by subtraction.

At first, I thought editing would be about grammar and flow, but it has turned out to be something far more interesting and far more difficult. It’s a process of curiosity and clarity, of asking what will keep readers engaged long enough to find something meaningful in my story. What I am learning is that some parts of my story belong to me alone. Others I can share with readers.

I thought it would hurt to cut my words from the page, but each time I remove a section or tighten a paragraph, I can feel the story coming into sharper focus. It is still mine, but it’s no longer only for me.

Ultimately, what I want is simple. I want my words to mean something. I want them to land where they are needed.

Engineering by subtraction isn’t about making something smaller. It’s about clearing away the noise so what matters most can be heard.

As I put these words down, I realize that this idea applies beyond writing. In my recovery, I have sometimes fallen into the trap of believing that being seen requires offering everything: every story, every detail, every piece of who I am. But being seen does not have to mean full exposure. It can mean sharing with intention, choosing what to reveal and when.

The question isn’t whether to share, but how much, and with whom. Sometimes holding details back helps the deeper truth come through.

We can choose what to share and what to hold close. We can decide which parts of ourselves will bring others closer, and which are meant to stay within the quiet of our own understanding until we find the right moment, the right context, or the right person to receive them.

Connection does not require full disclosure. It requires presence and thought. In the end, editing is learning what matters most and letting the rest fall away.