Hello, writers. I’ve talked in the past about cutting words, and how useful a tool it can be for writers. The older I get, the more useful I find it.
I used to cut just once, on my penultimate read-through before submitting a manuscript. I usually had a goal of cutting 5,000 words, and would succeed in cutting only 2,000. I now cut several times over the writing and rewriting process— continually, in fact.
So what’s the point of cutting? It’s not just to get a shorter manuscript that fits industry specs, although that’s part of it. It’s also to make the prose cleaner and crisper, and to allow those points that you really want to shine (favorite lines, favorite character moments) to shine brighter.
I’ve just cut 2,800 words off my current work-in-progress, a middle grade novel with a planned publication date in 2016. (HarperCollins. Working title: Miss Ellicott’s School for the Magically Minded.) My goal was to cut 3,000, so I nearly made it.
Here’s the procedure.
1. Decide how many words you want to cut.
2. Print out your manuscript.
3. Divide the number of words you want to cut by the number of pages you’ve printed. In this case there were 202 pages, so my goal was to cut 15 words a page.
4. Take a pen and try to hunt out the target number of words to delete on every single page. Write your score at the bottom of each page.
(Keeping score is important, because it gives you an incentive to keep hunting out that one little extra word you can do away with it.)
Here are some examples of cuts I made, and why I made them. (Underlined words are words I added.)
“We can’t buy dinner.”
“Why should you need to buy dinner?”
Deleting the unnecessary repetion cuts two words. Sometimes repetition serves a rhythmic purpose. This one doesn’t.
He waved them through toward a high arched hallway that opened beyond the office.
It doesn’t matter exactly where the hallway is, so those five extra words can go.
Changing “them through” to “toward” saves a word, but it also saves misunderstanding. He’s not waving
them. My drafts tend to be full of this sort of misplaced object. I never realized this till I joined a writing workshop.
With a sigh, she thought of Miss Ellicott.
I discovered my protagonist was doing everything with a sigh. Sometimes she ended the sentence with a sigh, sometimes she began it with one. After this week’s cuts, only three sighs remain.
The fact was it was a very big city.
“The fact was” over and over again in this manuscript! No longer.
She gestured broadly with her arm.
Yeah, what else was she going to gesture with? I mean, the choices are fairly limited. There’s no need to say what she gestured with unless it was something really unusual. Someone else’s arm, for example.
There were pools of water here and there in hollows on the rock.
This is only a net reduction of one word, but it gets rid of the vague “here and there” and replaces it with something more specific.
It was pitch dark. She couldn’t see a thing.
Since the second sentence describes what we would expect, it can go.
“So you’re spying on me, are you?” said Mrs. Warthall, standing in front of stood before the fireplace, hands on hips.
This is one I did purely to reduce word count. I don’t think the changes I made in this sentence add anything stylistically.
Besides the above examples, there are many whole sentences and even some paragraphs I cut out simply because they described something that was already adequately described.
On my next round of cuts, which will probably follow my next revision and immediately precede turning the manuscript in to the publisher, I’m going to be looking for places where I’ve overexplained things, not trusted the reader enough.
Anyway, I thought the above might be faintly interesting to some people, as I’m always urging you to cut stuff, make it shorter, limit yourself to 100 words, etc… this is why :-).
Tonight’s challenge:
Describe one of the following events in 50 words or less. Absolute limit! No rambling. 50.
- the assassination of Abraham Lincoln
- the 2000 presidential election
- the Boston Tea Party
- A callow youth and his/her stout companion are searching the Sludge of Iniquity for the lost Jewel of Togwogmagog
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