Last week I regaled you with the thrilling tale of how I arrived at attempting to cut 40,000 words from my novel without ruining it.
While the jury is still out on whether I ruined it or not, I did reduce the word count from 135,470 to 90,222. And jolly pleased I was too, especially as a) the story, to me, still made sense, and b) not only that, I think it's made it a lot better. It's much tighter and flows well. Which is a little humiliating, as it shows how overwritten it was.
Here's how I did it:
- Any direction, now
First off, I looked for irritating ticks that I did repetitively. One in particular I noted was that I tended to add too many positional or direction words: move away, jerked up etc. Just tidying 'up's and 'down's, and the like, I cut nearly 2,000 words. It was a good start. I also realised I'd overused the word, 'now'. 875 of the little blighters sent to oblivion!
- Condensing scenes
I looked at the plot for places where I might condense, merge or cut sequences. I was able, with a bit of jiggery-pokery, to remove an entire chapter this way. This worked well for the first act of the book, but I must have got better at writing, as it provided diminishing returns as I went on.
- Telling, not showing
So many times, I'd explain something when it was already patently obvious from the dialogue and the actions what the characters were thinking. It took me a while to get tuned into this, but once I started seeing it, it was easy to spot.
- Edit, edit, edit
I went through the whole book, sentence by sentence, asking, 'can I say this in a better way?', 'does this move the story forwards?' and 'does it still make sense without it?' This is where I cut a lot of flab. Sometimes whole paragraphs fell to the floor. As I say, quite humbling.
And that was it, really. Nothing too clever, just a lot of hard work. I'm now doing an 'immediate, not remote' pass, which is bumping up the word count a little. But I don't mind as I'm sure once it's done, if I need to do a final reduction pass, I know I can.