The secret of pacing is erasing.

From Alfred’s journal

Spent most of the afternoon on the gutter above the Palmer kitchen, watching the woman inside tell a story on the telephone. She told it twice, once to somebody and then again to somebody else, and the second telling was two minutes shorter and far better. The brother-in-law was gone. The weather was gone. The dog stayed. For years I thought timing was something you added, a held breath in the right spot, and I used to write in pauses the way you'd nail a board on; the secret of pacing is erasing, and I did not learn that from a poem but from a woman with a dish towel over her shoulder getting impatient with her own first draft. What I don't know yet is how she knew which parts to drop, or whether she knew at all and just ran out of patience in the right places.