When it Comes to Cutting Your Word Count, Line Edits Won't Cut It

Let me paint a picture for you:

You’ve drafted and drafted. The story pouring out of you. You neared your target word count, but the story just wasn’t done yet. You put aside your inner critic and just told the story. Finally, you typed “THE END.”

You’ve got this great story, exactly how you wanted it to be told.

The problem?

It’s 10,000, 20,000, or more words (!!) over the ideal word count for your genre. Whoops!

No problem, you think.

You turn back to page one and start looking for filter words.

A few days/weeks later, you check that word count and the needle hasn’t moved nearly as much as you need it to.

Now what?

I’ve got bad news for you.

Many writers mistakenly end up in line edit land too early when what they really need is a critical eye on story structure.

When it comes to cutting your word count, line edits won’t cut it. Here are five tips for significantly reducing your word count while making your story stronger:

1. DON’T DO ANYTHING WITHOUT DOING THIS FIRST: Does your story trajectory make sense?

   Check that your scenes connective tissue is “because of that” and not “and then” before making any cuts as it could impact word count up or down. (Read more about because of that here). Ensuring a strong character arc might mean cutting some scenes or adding others. Don’t do anything until you’ve got your trajectory nailed down

2. Does every scene move the story forward?

   This is where you look for info dumps, flashbacks, or other backstory blurbs that aren’t serving your story heart. If they aren’t moving your plot or your character forward in the story, take a good hard look as to whether they need to be there at all.

3. Eliminate subpar subplots

   First, check to see if any subplot characters are redundant. Can you combine two characters into one, for instance. This happened to me. I had an older nanny and a mother-in-law in my story. They both served the same purpose at various points of the story (voice of wisdom) and it made more sense to eliminate the nanny and go with the mother-in-law.

   Second, is every subplot related to your core story in some way? If there is a romantic subplot, is it complicating the main plot? Is your subplot a mirror subplot that teaches your protagonist a lesson? Or is your subplot just a fun idea you had for your quirky best friend character to have something to do on the page?

   If your subplot isn’t helping to move your main protagonist’s story forward in some way (and yes, complications can move your story forward), then you might want to consider saving it for its own future story.

4. Say what? Discard those dialogue distractions!

   Readers want realistic dialogue, but we don’t need you to repeat something the reader already knows (a character filling another character in on what happened in the scene previous — we know, we were there), focus on logistics (getting from place A to place B, unless it’s imperative to the story), or be filled with generic conversational warm-up and wrap-up stuff.

   You may notice a theme, but with your dialogue, just like your subplots and your main scenes, consider: Does it move the story forward? If not, can you cut it down so that it does or do you need that chit-chat scene at all?

5. Beginnings and Endings

   Look at the start and end of every scene. Can you cut the first/last line? What about the first/last paragraph? We tend to write our way into scenes which can show up at the start of a scene but also at the end as we start thinking about where the next scene might be going. Take a good look at where the real action of the scene is starting and where the real drama of the scene lands to propel the reader into the next scene at the end. Cut anything before and after.

Hopefully these big edits have moved you closer to your target word goal.

Once you’re in the “I need to cut 5,000 words or less” camp, you can look to your line level edits.

Filter words are always a good place to start. You’ll be surprised how many “justs,” or “that’s,” or “was verb-ing” you may have (turn “was running” into “ran” and you not only saved a word, you made the sentence better!). Then, use the trick a writing friend passed along to me when I needed to cut about 5,000 words: Cut 10 words a page. That’s it. You can definitely cut 10 words a page if you look carefully. In a 300 page manuscript, that’s 3,000 words.

Whatever you do, remember your 3 revision A’s: Assess, Analyze, and Adjust.

And nothing makes a story shine like removing all the deadweight of excess words that surround it.

Happy Slicing!

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