The Finite Library — Compression as a Form

Borges proposed that the proper response to a five-hundred-page idea is a ten-page commentary on the imaginary book that contains it. The novel he refused to write becomes the story he did. Compression is not poverty of invention; it is invention's purest form.

Every Borges fiction behaves like a card catalog: a single entry that implies a vast, unwritten collection. The reader does the work of expansion, and the work is more durable for being undertaken in their own mind.

Take a chapter you intend to write and reduce it to its argument in three sentences. If those three sentences are interesting, the chapter is unnecessary. If they are dull, the chapter will not save them.