Why restraint only works when something underneath is unstable
Restraint reads as intention only when there's something underneath straining against it. Take away the pressure and what's left isn't minimal — it's just empty. The blank page has to have weather behind it.
The Quiet Metrics taught me this the hard way: every sentence I cut had to leave a pressure behind it, or the cut just read as absence. Restraint isn't the removal of material — it's the visible evidence that material existed and was declined. A blank wall isn't minimal. A wall with one nail and a faint rectangle where a painting used to hang — that's minimal. That's restraint. The ghost is the point.