Pruning and Paring

Having spent a large part of the weekend denuding the citrus trees of fruit, I have been thinking about the similarities between maintaining fruit trees and improving creative outputs.
The trees have been in Mum's garden for almost 40 years now. Dad always used to spray them for bugs and diseases (until 8 years ago when he was committed), since then they have been fully organic with citrus fertiliser placed around the dripline each year by Mum. The lime and mandarin both have a bad case of sooty mold, the lemon and lemonade trees seem to have escaped that, and have a good quantity of steelblue ladybirds which I assume are munching all the nasty citrus pests.
I started by merely evening up the look of the trees and removing ripe fruit, but by the end I was cutting everything back hard in an effort to remove all the sooty mold affected leaves and branches.
It all reminds me of the "Report of an Investigation" (something like a mini-thesis) I was required to complete during my fourth year at university. At the time I was a bonded cadet with NZTP (the then NZ Tourist and Publicity Dept), and I was majoring in Marketing and Japanese, so the topic I chose was: "Potential for New Segments in the Japanese Tourism Market".
The idea was to produce a useful report of around 30-40,000 words. My first draft was about 150,000. I was extremely fortunate to have a Professor whose former field was English and she gave me some very sound advice as we pruned my work back to something close to the limit.
"Always use a simple word if you have the choice between an obscure, lofty sounding term and a simple one. Always simplify your sentences as much as possible. Usually several short ones are preferable to one long, hard to understand one. Write to communicate, not to impress. The only reason to reiterate someting in a different way is if it is critically important and there's a chance the reader will miss it otherwise. If you want your report to be used, structure it well, summarise where necessary and help the reader to find what they need easily."
Although my writing is now mostly of the creative rather than business reporting kind, I recognise that writing large and then paring back works best for me. I also know that elegant and lofty words may intrigue me, but can sometimes detract from communicating my message. A good table of contents and details kept in appendices can make the whole lot more user-friendly.
So, coming back to the trees, they are mature, have been fed and watered, have been pruned, and next year they will again no doubt produce a bumper crop of juicy, nutritious fruit.
So now I will remember to let my creative ideas mature, stew over them a while before committing them to paper. I will let my mind be washed and fed by GOOD books. I will recraft the words that spill out onto paper, removing the dead-wood. And next year,  I may have a book that I and others find refreshing and nutritious to the soul.