Writer Clinic: On Cutting Words (Premium Post)

How to reduce your word counts without cutting important material

In his book On Writing, which I definitely recommend, horror great Stephen King once described revision as the first draft minus 10%. Although that seems to be rather rigid and dogmatic, my own experiences with my writing projects does suggest first drafts are often too wordy. If I remember right, the first draft of my steampunk military fantasy Battle for the Wastelands was 101,000 words, but the final novel is around 89,000 words. And that was with a new scene added after the cuts!

(The part where Catalina Merrill is teaching her son to swim in the tyrant Grendel’s harem pool, only for rival concubine Lenora Starr to interrupt, was not part of the original draft.)

Apex Publications honcho Jason Sizemore, whom I hired to edit and format Battle, its prequel novella “Son of Grendel,” and the urban scifi-horror novel The Atlanta Incursion helped me tighten up all three. More recently, fellow author Christine Morgan, whom I hired to edit Battle’s full sequel Serpent Sword and my most recent book The Walking Worm, gave me many thousands of words of suggested cuts. Even though I didn’t use all suggested edits, I definitely cut between 5,000 and 7,000 words off TWW and possibly close to 10,000 words off Serpent Sword.

Although many writers advise “kill your darlings” (i.e. cut scenes that you like if they don’t serve the story or don’t justify their word count), there are ways to cut words that don’t involve cutting the meat of the story. Here are some tips — some paywalled and some not — for little cuts that add up to a lot of words, especially in a longer manuscript.

*Something I learned from my career in professional journalism was “that” and “being.” If you’re looking to cut words, I would search those two specifically and see if they can be removed.

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