I’ve noticed the people often talk about God as the master of whatever it is they do. My parents say God is the master teacher. As teachers, they stand in awe of his pedagogy. But I’ve heard him called the master gardener, artist, and scientist—whatever we are, whenever we really come to love something, we see how good God is at it. It’s probably unsurprising, then, that I think of God as the master storyteller. And by master, I do mean master of His craft, but I also mean master in terms of a master and apprentice. God isn’t just a brilliant storyteller—He teaches us how to write our stories.

I’ve had a lot of writing teachers, and they’ve taught me a lot of things, like how to write topic sentences and where the commas go. The thing they teach most consistently though, is what to cut. Over and over again, I’ve sat in offices while my professors read through my work, drawing lines through paragraphs or scribbling in the margins. I’ve read the titles of their books until they look up and give the diagnosis. Once, Steve pointed to an underlined bit and said, “I think this sentence would be better not existing.” When Peter gave back the first draft of my thesis, he said, “I liked some of this, I just didn’t mark those things.” “Unnecessarily flippant” is what one of my favorite professors said about several of my favorite bits of one paper, probably because I was getting a bit impatient with historians being so sexist.

Sometimes my writing masters have been more gentle, but they all say things like that. What every writer really needs is a good editor to read through their stuff and say, “Nope. Not that.”