There’s a great quote often attributed to Mark Twain: “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”

The attribution to Twain is shaky, but the idea behind the quote is dead-on. Writing something long is easy. You dump everything onto the page. Every thought, every detail, every side road gets included. Making something shorter takes work because you have to decide what matters. You have to figure out what the story is, then start cutting away everything that gets in its way.

In other words, you have to edit.

I think about this all the time because I edit constantly, and I’m not talking about GoNaked Magazine. I edit information. I edit photographs. I edit businesses. I edit the way I tell stories. I edit my surroundings. I even edit the way I explain my own life.

I can't tell you how many times a day a lengthy article comes across my screen and mildly piques my curiosity. I’m interested enough to want to know what it says, but not interested enough to give it 15 minutes of my life. So I copy the article, drop it into ChatGPT, and ask for the important parts. I don't do this with something I care deeply about. If the subject matters to me, I want the whole thing. But sometimes I want a taste. Give me the point. Tell me what matters. Edit out everything else. If it sounds interesting enough, I'll go back to read it in its entirety and grab the nuance.

The photographs here are another perfect example.

I found this image on Tumblr and I wanted to use itelsewhere in the newsletter. The original was dark and a little soft, with a lot of empty space surrounding a beautiful man. There was nothing wrong with the photograph, but the photograph wasn't telling the story I wanted.

So I took it into an image-enhancement tool and sharpened it. I fixed the lighting so you could see his face, his body, the texture of his skin, and the details that were getting lost in the shadows.

Better. But I still wasn't finished.

There was too much room around him. My eye wandered to the window shade, the walls, and the bed instead of immediately going where I wanted it to go. So I cropped the photo.

Suddenly, the story changed.

It's the exact same man, in the exact same pose, on the exact same bed. I didn't add anything. I edited things away. By removing what wasn't important, I made what was important harder to miss.

And isn't that what good editing does?

I've been doing the same thing with a new business of mine, The Dorothy Society. For a while, I had The Dorothy Society and the Dorothy Travel Blog. There were different names and different places for people to go. I understood how everything fit together because I created the damn thing. Someone encountering it for the first time didn't have that advantage.

It was too much.

So I edited.

Now there's The Dorothy Society. One name. One site. One place to go. People don't need a flowchart to understand where they landed or where they should click next. Removing things made the business easier to understand.

Yesterday, I found myself editing something even more personal: my own life story.

I had a meeting with the new back-office manager for one of the clients I work with. She wanted to know about me, what I do, and how I ended up doing all these strange and different things.

That's a long story.

I could start decades ago and give her every job, every business, every success, every spectacular failure, every wrong turn, every lucky break, and every person who pushed me in a different direction. Somewhere around 1997, I suspect her eyes would glaze over and she'd begin regretting asking the question.

So I have an edited version.

I've told my story enough times that I've learned which parts matter. I hit the highlights. I linger over a few colorful moments. I skip entire chapters. I connect pieces that make the journey make sense.

Is it the complete story of how I got here?

Of course not.

But it tells the story I need to tell.

That's one reason I've struggled with getting serious about TikTok and YouTube. Shooting video doesn't bother me. Editing does. Video editing takes time because you aren't simply removing the bad takes. You're deciding what the story is.

Where does it begin? What stays? What goes? How long do you let a moment breathe? When do you move on?

AI will happily make some of those decisions for me, but I'm reluctant to hand over the entire job. I want to decide what the story is. That's the part that interests me.

Once you start thinking about editing this way, you see it everywhere.

I'm sitting in my living room writing this and noticing clutter. There are things sitting around that don't add anything to the room. So what do I need to do?

Edit.

Take something away. Move something. Get rid of something I no longer need. The room doesn't necessarily need something new. It might look better with less.

Fashion works the same way. We've all seen somebody wearing a great shirt, great pants, great shoes, three bracelets, two necklaces, a scarf, four rings, a hat, sunglasses, and enough accessories to stock a small boutique. Individually, some of those pieces might be fabulous. Together, nobody knows where to look.

Edit.

Take off three things and suddenly you see the person again.

Of course, for those of us who are nudists, editing your look presents an interesting problem. We've already removed pretty much everything.

Sometimes our version of editing might mean adding something back. A necklace. A harness. A great pair of boots. Or a cock ring.

Editing isn't always about making something shorter or removing everything possible. It's about deciding what deserves attention.

That's the lesson I keep finding in all these seemingly unrelated parts of my life.

The goal isn't less. The goal is focus.

A photograph becomes stronger when your eye knows where to go. A business becomes clearer when customers know where to go. A story becomes better when the listener understands why you're telling it. A room becomes more pleasing when your favorite things aren't fighting with twenty other things for attention.

And perhaps our lives work the same way.

We spend years accumulating things. Possessions. Commitments. Habits. Obligations. Stories about ourselves. People. Projects. Ideas about who we're supposed to be. Some of those things still belong in the picture.

Some don't.

The trick is deciding which is which.

So here's the question I'm asking myself today:

How are you going to edit your life today?