Recently, I had been forced to accept a reality that I had struggled to deny: my manuscript – my beloved, carefully crafted work of six years – was overweight.
At two hundred and twenty-three thousand words, it might have passed easily as the work of an established name in the fantasy genre – but debut authors aren’t granted the same lenience when they waste words, as I was told in somewhat kinder terms by a number of agents.
And so it was with a feeling of resignation that I turned back to the manuscript, putting my writing of the second volume on hold, to produce a second version: the short version. My ambitious target: to not just reduce the word count to below the magical 200,000 word mark, but well below it. I set a target of 180,000 words or below for the new version.
So, how does one find almost 45,000 words to trim from one’s manuscript – a manuscript that one has already edited and finished to one’s satisfaction?
Identifying The Fat
The first step in shedding fat from your manuscript is to identify where the fat is. This starts at a macro level, and works its way all the way down into the minute details of each individual chapter and scene:
- Plot lines
- Chapters
- Scenes
- Paragraphs
- Words
We’ll look in detail at each of those categories, and how to identify and remove fat from your precious – but overweight – manuscript. It’s for its own health, after all.
But before we get into the details, I’d like to start by laying down some foundations for how I’ve managed to identify and eliminate extraneous material to prune from my manuscript, and ultimately make it not only leaner but better in the process.
Principles
There is a rule in art; a rule that is so close to universally accepted that it is almost a law. It can be stated a number of different ways, but here is the one that I have found works best for me personally:
What doesn’t add to the whole, subtracts from it.
That’s it. Simple, maybe obvious – but that simple statement is the foundation of slimming down your manuscript. Ultimately, there are only two kinds of plot lines; two kinds of chapters, scenes, or even paragraphs and words.
Those that add to the whole, and those that subtract from it.
Identifying which is which – and putting aside sentimentality for the weaker material – is what is needed to put your manuscript on a diet. With that out of the way, let’s get down to the specifics:
Plot Lines
Slimming down an overweight manuscript is like breaking down a pyramid; you want to start from the bottom to have the biggest effect. In the case of a novel, that means plot lines.
We’ll assume the main plot lines of any finished manuscript are fairly robust and essential to the story, so that’s not an area to focus on. Give them a look, by all means, but if one of the main plot lines of your story is actually just fat and is weakening the whole thing, it’s probably time to go back to the drawing board. I’ll assume they all pass muster.
Moving past them, we find the side plots. This is a key area to examine. Side plots can grow and expand out of control, and without proper gardening, enough of them can start to choke an entire series (I’m looking at you, Wheel of Time).
So how to sort the good side plots – the ones that add to the story, help define important characters, fill in crucial world building, etc. – from the bad – the ones that just take up space and lose the interest of the reader?
The answer is simple, and is the same for every topic, no matter how large or small. Give the side plot a good look, and ask yourself: What does this add to the story? What would the story look like without it?
Strip away your emotional attachment to the actual words you’ve written, and look only at the effect on the story. You might absolutely love the little detour in which your protagonist stops on an island kingdom and acquires an adorable, fuzzy pet – but if you can’t come up with even one good reason why it makes the story stronger by its addition, it’s having the opposite effect instead.
Keep the ideas you liked about it, bid it a fond farewell, and try to find a way to work them back into some future project where they actually fit.
Chapters
The next most extreme – and therefore potentially beneficial – cuts can be made at the chapter level. Here, the litmus test is simple: imagine the story without that chapter, and then imagine what the impact would be. If you aren’t immediately coming up with all sorts of problems and reasons to keep the chapter, you should probably begin to seriously consider cutting it from your manuscript entirely.
In my case, I had a chapter – a quite long chapter – that I rather liked. It featured some good character interaction, showed off some interesting details about weaponry and armor, and introduced a brief subplot.
It also broke up the momentum of the surrounding chapters, and that subplot that it introduced was utterly unessential to the story. When I forced myself to take a step back and examine it impartially, there was nothing about that chapter that justified its inclusion.
A novel isn’t a sitcom, existing to show your characters in as many interesting situations as you can put them in. It’s a story, and the chapters exist to tell that story.
Scenes
As we get higher up on the pyramid, the number of words supported by each block is reduced. Cutting a plot line can reduce a manuscript by tens of thousands of words. A chapter is at least several thousand each. The next smaller block, the scene, is likely to save less than a thousand.
That’s the negative, but the positive is that the higher up on the pyramid, the easier it is to find weak material to cut. Your manuscript probably doesn’t have any whole plot lines that can be cut without weakening it, and if you’re lucky it might not have any chapters. But once we get down to the scene level, just about every manuscript has some of this level of fat.
I’m talking about things like having your protagonist leave their house, but along the way they stop and grab a biscuit at the local market. Maybe you thought it was a nice change of pace when you wrote it, and wanted to showcase what the local treats are like in your fantasy city. Only, on closer examination, you realize that you spent 800 words on it, and it didn’t add a darned thing to the story.
That’s the sort of scene to look at. Do you have unnecessary Bs when your viewpoint character is going from A to C? Do you have an establishing scene to start a chapter, but the chapter would actually be better if it got straight to the action? Or maybe there’s a bit of world building, but instead of adding to the story it weakens it by providing information nobody wants?
Scenes that need trimming follow the same basic rule as plot lines, or chapters. If you take a good, hard look at the scene and can’t explain to yourself why it makes the chapter and story better, it makes it worse.
Paragraphs
The smallest block you’re realistically going to be hunting for, paragraphs are typically one or two hundred words at most. That’s not much, but they add up: cut one chunky paragraph from every chapter in a fifty chapter novel, and you’ve done 5,000 to 10,000 words right there.
For me, the paragraphs to look at are usually unnecessary descriptive text. A lot of my writing – particularly my older writing – runs too heavy on the descriptive side.
When you’re looking at a solid block of descriptive paragraphs, a good idea is to read the whole thing, and consider if you could summarize it successfully into fewer paragraphs. If you can, rewrite it along those lines. It’s only if you can’t – when there’s actually enough content to fill all that space – that you’re already looking at the right amount.
Words
By the time you get this far up the pyramid, you’re not looking for single instances anymore. It doesn’t do you any good to cut a single word from every chapter – that’s not going to add up to even one extraneous paragraph, and you’d be completely wasting your time if you actually started combing through your manuscript on that level.
What you’re looking for, instead, is word usage. You’re looking for patterns of where you consistently use too many words, and eliminating those. Do you have a tendency to over-describe reactions? Add too many qualifiers or superlatives? Perhaps simply put too many words between dialogue, when uninterrupted dialogue would do just fine?
Take a good look at your most basic writing habits, and how they might be unproductively driving up your word count. Chances are, if you’re having trouble with your manuscript length, you’ll be surprised at what you find.
And that’s a good place to stop, because we’re starting to get into a subject for a whole different post!