by Gina Conroy, @GinaConroy
When I contracted my mystery novella last year and had to cut 36,000 words from my WIP, I knew it was going to be hard. In fact, I almost bailed on submitting the anthology because I knew that would mean cutting more than half my story. The pain of deleting my brilliant prose aside, I knew it would be difficult to edit this mystery whose characters and clues were tightly woven together.
But I signed that contract, took a deep breath, and said a prayer. I could do this!
The first 10,000 words went easily when I realized there were plenty of unnecessary words I could delete. Then I started messing with my characters’ voices and that hurt. So I moved on to the boring, not so important scenes. Found a few of those. Cut a couple of fun, but unnecessary characters, and started the whole process again.
This went on for months until I was down to the last 8,000 words. I wrote to my agent telling him I was having a hard time swallowing this elephant. I couldn’t see how I could cut the last 8,000 words. He very wisely told me that when the ark is sinking, I should throw the elephant out first. In other words, find big chunks I could cut.
Problem was, I did that. Over and over again. Or did I? Sure, I got rid of the easy stuff, then the scenes I could live without, but now 8,000 words shy of my goal I had to take a closer look and go chapter by chapter salvaging the voice and heart of my story as well as cutting the stuff my book could live without. Notice I didn’t say “What I could live without!”
Was it easy? No, but I got my mystery from 56,000 down to 21,000 words. Here are some things I learned that hopefully will help you write tight and cut the fat from your WIP!
Don’t Show Everything
I know it’s been drilled into us to show don’t tell, but a wise author once said that refers primarily to emotions. I learned that I could “tell” how a person got from point A to point D and skip the details in between. Not only will it make your story move, but it will cut the word count.
Cut the Unnecessary Words
YOU KNOW that word or phrase your character ALWAYS uses all the time JUST like my character DOES. JUST cut it out ALREADY! JUST do a search for those words and CAPITALIZE them, so when you go BACK through your WIP, they jump out at you. I cut several thousand words this way.
Cut the Double Talk
I admit I’m wordy. Editing this story made me realize I often say the same thing a couple of times in different ways. For example, I might have internal dialogue and external dialogue that say similar things or my character might ask himself a question when it was already expressed in another way in a previous chapter. Not only can it be annoying to the reader, but it slows down the action. Just cut it out, no matter how much you’re in love with all the creative ways you’ve said it.
Resist the Urge to Explain (RUE)
In an effort to make my character’s motivations clear, I often tried to explain them through internal dialogue, external dialogue or both. Then I started asking myself “Does the reader need to know this now?” If the answer was no, I cut it and looked for a shorter way to weave in the motivation later. I learned, most times it was unnecessary. I had packed the scene enough that I believe the reader understood without me telling them.
Pick Your Adverbs, Adjectives, and Conjunctions Carefully
Most times, if your writing is strong, you don’t need many adverbs and adjectives. Sometimes you do. I noticed my adjectives would sometimes come in pairs. That’s when I chose one over the other. When it comes to starting a sentence, I seem to favor AND and BUT. I’m not sure why, but now that I know, I can go back and keep the conjunctions that add to the story. And I’m not talking word count.
Get Rid of Prepositions Trying to cut those last 8,000 had me looking closer at my sentence structure and prepositions. I learned by cutting certain prepositions I could save one or two words. For example, instead of “the pieces of the telescope” I could say, “the telescope’s pieces.” “Clutching a bottle of Pepcid AC” becomes “clutching a Pepcid AC bottle.” With the search and find feature, I could track down these pesky prepositions and send them packing.
Cut the Scene Short
I like to wrap up a scene sometimes with a cliff hanger, often times with internal dialogue. But if I cut the last sentence or two from the scene, it still works. Often times it reads better.
Contractions are Your Friend
This might not work for historical stories, but since my WIP was contemporary, anywhere I could use a contraction, I did. Unless your character is “proper” or foreign, most people talk in contractions anyway.
Deleting our wonderfully crafted prose is one of the hardest things we do as authors, but it’s necessary especially if you’re contracted for 20,000 words and have a story that’s 56,000. I didn’t quite make 20,000 words, but I knew my anthology partners were a little shy of their word count. I submitted 21,000…and got a note back I needed to cut another 700. How did I do it? By going back through the list above.
How do you get your word count down and what techniques have you found to make it easier?
Gina will be giving away an ebook to a randomly-chosen commenter today. Thanks for your comments!
Gina Conroy used to think she knew where her life was headed; now she’s learning to embrace life’s detours. After seven years of dream pursuit, she held her first novella, Buried Deception in the Cherry Blossom Capers Collection, in her hands and recently released her first full length mystery, Digging Up Death.
Gina founded Writer…Interrupted to encourage busy writers and chronicles her triumphs and trials as she pursues her dreams while encouraging her family and others to chase after their own passions. Gina loves to connect with readers, and when she isn’t writing, teaching, or driving kids around, you can find her on Facebook and Twitter, or pursuing her new passion — ballroom and swing dancing!
Summary:
Archaeology Professor Mari Duggins is adjusting to life as a single mom and trying to balance a television career, but gets caught between the pull of her former flame, a field archaeologist, and her ex-husband who is wanted by the FBI on an antiquities crime. Then her colleague is murdered, and she gets in over her head as she searches for truth in a desert of lies. Mari Duggins’ life caves in as she tries to excavate the truth, but realizes only God can dig her out of the hole she’s created. Will Mari sort through her muddled feelings and put her trust in someone else before her world caves in? Or will the truth bury her alive?
My Novella: Buried Deception in the Cherry Blossom Capers Collection
Mount Vernon archaeology intern and widow Samantha Steele wants to provide for her children without assistance from anyone. Security guard and ex-cop Nick Porter is haunted by his past and keeps his heart guarded. But when they discover an artifact at Mount Vernon is a fake, Nick and Samantha need to work together, set aside their stubbornness, and rely on each other or the results could be deadly. Will Samantha relinquish her control to a man she hardly knows? Can Nick learn to trust again? And will they both allow God to excavate their hearts so they can find new love?
It’s true that you can ruin a story by trying to cut it too far (so always keep the old drafts), but trying to cut something far beyond what it should be cut is also a great learning experience.
Particularly on the scene level, you really learn the focus of your scene if you have to bring it in shorter than you wanted to.
Elizabeth – Thanks for hosting Gina.
Gina – You give such excellent advice for ‘cutting out the fat’ in our stories. I think the two I need to pay most attention to are resisting the urge to explain and avoiding ‘double talk’ (I like that expression too). I think sometimes we want so much for people to understand our stories that we talk too much and don’t say enough, if you know what I mean. I wish you much success!
I’ve never had to cut that drastically, but I did pare my first novel from 141,000 words to about 85,000. All the tips you’ve given here are perfect (and if you’re writing a short story or novella, telling becomes a must). When I went through my manuscript, my mantra was, “but does it advance the plot?” because I had a lot of ‘cool’ stuff that really wasn’t propelling the story.
Terry
Terry’s Place
Thanks so much for posting today, Gina! Great tips here, particularly RUE. It took me a while to learn that the readers didn’t need to know *everything*.
Looking forward to reading your new book. :)
Excellent list of tips. I tend to write long and had to hack 35,000 words out of a book once. It was slow starting, but I soon realized how much wasn’t needed.
So impressed how you tackled this, Gina! Thanks for passing along the wisdom that helped you slice and dice.
~ Wendy
The Daring Novelist, you are right! I tend to over write, but there are many who under write. Have to find that perfect balance.
Elizabeth Spann: I still have trouble with RUE, and I don’t worry about it in the first draft. That’s what edits are for! ;)
Margot Kinberg: Thanks, and yes I know exactly what you mean, in fact, I completely understand! ;)
L. Diane Wolfe: I would have liked to keep some of the scenes in I had to cut, but the story is a real page turner now! No room for it not to be!
Wendy: Thanks, and hopefully it will be a lesson in learning to write tighter so we don’t have to cut a bunch of fat!
Terry Odell: That still is a lot of words! And that’s a good mantra!
My first drafts are littered with redundancies – and they’re sometimes hard to spot when I’m editing. I’m getting better though!
Thanks, Gina. This is actually something I’m dealing with right now as I have a 17,000 word limit that I am constantly dancing back and forth over as I edit — i seem to be adding more than I’m subtracting. For every word trio I reduce to a pair I add another full paragraph! And I, too, tend to be wordy and then have a hard time cutting it down. And i also start with a lot of Ands and Buts and probably over explain things. Thanks for these tools, though, i’ll put them to use today!
J.D., Glad I could help and if you do a search for all those ANDs, BUTs, JUSTs, etc. you’ll be surprised at how much you use them and how much you can cut! Good luck! If I can do it, you can do it!
This is the best I’ve seen on cutting. Thank you!
It’s rare I have to cut since I’m such a bare bones writer, but I’m marking this checklist in case I get stuck in cutting.
Kath: My pain is your gain… glad I could help!
Alex: Maybe you can reverse the list to put some meat on your bones! ;)
I definitely do the “explaining” thing too much. My CP usually has to say, “we get it already!” Funny how we don’t even notice that stuff until later. Thanks so much for the great tips!
If you cut a huge amount of verbal fat by trimming words, etc., then you really need to rethink your writing style because it is bloated and not ready for prime time.
There are other ways to cut length.
From working with writers over the years, I’d say that the primary thing most writers need to cut is writer information. We sometimes do our thinking on the page before we write down what the reader needs to see, and we fail to cut that out.
Writers also tend toward too much introspection. If all a character is doing in a scene is thinking about other things, get rid of that scene and insert that information into dialogue.
The great Phyllis Whitney once said that the only reason a character should be folding laundry and thinking is so an ax murderer can sneak up on her, and the reader knows this through subtle clues.
There’s also the rule of three. If a scene doesn’t contain at least one or two plot points (information or events which move the plot forward), and one or two character points (important character information) so that you have at least three points total, then it should be tossed, and whatever points included in that scene should be added to another scene.
For major cuts, you can also consolidate several secondary characters into one character, or a subplot can be simplified or removed if it doesn’t influence the major plot or the influence can be moved to another subplot.
Also, as a good exercise in cutting to the bare bones of a story, turn your story into a screenplay.
Every screenplay page is equal to a minute of screen time so this is no easy task for a novelist, and it’s why short stories are often the most successful adaptions to the screen.
Excellent advice, especially the don’t show everything bit.
Great suggestions. I once cut a story from 95k to 60k. Would almost prefer a root canal.