At about the 3 minute mark in the video above Shea Hembrey discusses the criteria he uses to judge quality art. The first of his criteria is particularly relevant to me, given what I try to accomplish in my writing:
So amongst all the criteria I have, there's two main things. One of them, I call my Mimaw's Test. And what that is I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes, and if I can't explain it in five minutes, then it's too obtuse or esoteric and it hasn't been refined enough yet. It needs to worked on until it can speak fluently.
Refining an idea until it can "speak fluently" is a struggle for big-picture thinkers. In my experience it is definitely the most difficult part of the writing process. I can ramble on endlessly about the ideas I find interesting and all the associations those ideas bring to mind...but those associations, in their unrefined form, rarely produce resonance for anyone but myself. Moreover, few readers will have the patience to wade through my rambling stream of consciousness in order to extract the few needles in the haystack.
The process of refinement is, in its essence, the process of generating an appropriate compression algorithm. It is a process of testing various phrasings, metaphors, and perceptual analogies to discover those that most effectively compress sprawling meaning into a compact package. The best compression schemes contain so much depth that almost anyone can understand them at whatever depth of meaning they choose.
The best example that immediately comes to mind is Einstein's insight:
Space and Time are curved gravity.
That is an idea that can be explained to child:
A planet's orbit is like the inertia of a marble carrying it along a circular path around the edge of a fruit bowl.
Yet, relativity is an idea with so much depth that it can also occupy the career of a Ph.D. theoretical physicist.
Theories exhibiting such elegance are never produced in a single flash of insight, but instead require a consistent effort...continually compressing bigger and bigger ideas into smaller and smaller packages.
