Some years ago, my husband and I and our two young children moved from Europe, where we had been working, back to California.

Moving an entire household across an ocean and a continent is a huge job. And it requires “editing” your life:

• You sell your electric appliances because they won’t work in the new place.
• You get rid of junk that’s been sitting around for years because you don’t want to pay to move it halfway around the world.
• You send only the bare minimum of your remaining belongings by air, again to save money. The rest goes in a container and travels by ship and, in our case, train.

That meant we arrived at our new home well before most of our belongings did.

We spent about six weeks wearing the few sets of clothes we had packed, using two small pans to cook meals, and eating with plastic utensils and paper plates, seated at a folding card table we bought at Target.

It was sort of like camping indoors. But the amazing thing was that our house, though smaller than the one we had left, felt uncluttered. Roomy, even.

If it had been a piece of writing, it would have been full of eye-pleasing white space.

The moment of truth

Then one day, the movers showed up with our container and unloaded a mountain of cardboard boxes in the middle of our living room.

We stared at the boxes and tried to remember what items they held. It dawned on us that we were used to living without them, whatever they were.

My husband and I looked at each other. “Maybe we should just throw them away without even opening them.” A heady thought.

We knew that once we saw what was in the boxes, the emotional connection to this bauble or that decorative mug would be too strong and we would have to keep everything. And find somewhere to put it all.

That can happen to experts when they write

The more a writer knows about his topic, the more he needs a good editor.  At least, that’s been my experience in years of editing business reports, websites, and other nonfiction writing.

It’s not that subject-matter experts are bad writers. And they obviously know their stuff. But that’s the problem.

They tend to use jargon, buzzwords, and complex phrasing, and write above the average reader’s head. This can lose readers – fast.

The problem is, these writers don’t know how to get rid of the details that are important to them but not the reader. Like my family with our packing boxes, once they see their words on the page they don’t want to throw anything away.

Writers: “kill your darlings”

William Faulkner famously said, “In writing, you must kill your darlings.”

In other words, just because you love something you wrote doesn’t mean it should stay. A writer must be willing to delete words or passages from a draft for the sake of clarity.

But writers get attached to their words, their ideas, their “darlings.”

A good editor is objective and knows which words can stay and which ones should go. A good nonfiction editor gets rid of jargon and lets the author’s message come through clearly to non-experts.

The “For Dummies” series of books is masterful at this. I know this not only from reading some of the books, but also because I co-authored one.

So, what about those boxes?

In the end, we opened our boxes. It was nice to dine off of real dishes again, and use silverware. Some other items were useful, too, like winter jackets and such.

But others we left stored in boxes simply because we didn’t have anywhere to put them. We’re working on sorting through those things now, all these years later.

The comedian Mort Sahl once said, “My life needs editing.”

Back when we moved, we could have used an unpacking editor.