How to Cut Your Word Count without Destroying Your Story
There’s a Stephen King quote I’ve seen floating around about cutting 10% of your draft. I don’t know who made him of all people the authority on manuscript length BUT there is merit to this advice. What is important to remember, however, is it ISN’T a matter of length. A 90k manuscript isn’t automatically better than 100k manuscript. It comes down to content and the content of what you cut.
In other words, don’t cut words just to fulfill some vague requirement around cutting words. Rather, trim the fat. Cut what you don’t need. Find your crutch words, find the unnecessary adverbs, and find the passive voice.
When I go into a draft to “trim the fat”, I think about it in terms of Macro vs Micro. Macro is easy. It’s the full scenes and chapters that you can either cut or condense and combine with other scenes. These cuts will result in the largest word drops since you’ll be cutting full scenes and only you as the author knows if a full scene is worth cutting.
If you think you might want to cut a scene, ask yourself the purpose of the scene. What does the reader learn? What are the character objectives? How do they get farther or closer to reaching those objectives over the course of the scene? Is this scene similar to another scene and can they be combined?
Meanwhile, micro-cuts are trickier but these are where you are going to find the proverbial fat hiding. Even if you manage to sacrifice 10% of your manuscript to Novel Overlord Stephen King just by cutting chapters and scenes, you absolutely should still go into every chapter, every paragraph, every sentence with a fine-toothed comb to make these cuts. While cutting 10% elsewhere may check off some arbitrary checklist item, it won’t make your writing on a line level better.
However, going in and figuring how to say the same thing in less words will make your writing better.
STEP 1: Set a Percentage Cut Goal for each individual chapter instead of an overall goal for the entire manuscript. This does’t mean ten percent for each chapter because each writer is different. Some people edit as they go, some don’t, so an over-generalized “ten percent” won’t work for everyone. Instead, read through these tips and tricks and pick any chapter. Record chapter word count before and after editing and use that to figure out what your goal for each chapter should be. Remember that these are guidelines and not every chapter will be the same. Some might hit that target, others might not. AND THAT’S OKAY.
STEP 2: Check your scene transitions. This might be more a thing I struggle with than you do, but I’m terrible when it comes to getting characters from Scene A to Scene B. I tend to rely on too much detail, outlining exactly how Samantha opens the door, walks down the hall, goes into the stairwell, and down out the front lobby. It’s okay that my rough drafts add lengthy transitions because it helps me track my characters, their thoughts, and their feelings from one scene to another. However, these are the first places I look for when searching for fat to cut. The reader doesn’t need to know every step, every thought, and every feeling from point A to point B, they just need to know that they got there.
While this might not be something you struggle with, try to take a moment to identify any “writing crutches” that you tend to rely on to get the words on the page. See if you can find them in your writing and if they can be trimmed or cut entirely.
STEP 3: Ask yourself, “How can this line be shorter?” This is where things get real picky and real minute. I like to go through my work line by line and ask myself “Can this line be shorter and if so, how?” When I first started doing this, I was afraid it would standardize my writing, effectively eliminating author-voice and what made my writing mine. However, I’ve learned this isn’t the case. If anything, it amplifies it. It makes it clearer. It makes it punchier. However, going through line by line can be overwhelming and exhausting, so let's move onto “Control-F” tricks I use to quickly identify small ways to cut excess words.
STEP 4: “Felt”, “Thought”, “Wondered”. While I draft, Sammy makes a lot of “felt”, “thought, “wondered” statements. This is another example of a crutch and you can see how it highlights they way I think through Sammy’s thoughts with her. However, these statements often (but not always) weaken the line and add extra words.
Here’s an example from DELTA:
“Grades aren’t finalized, of course,” Mrs. Young said quickly and my palms broke out in sweat as I wondered why she seemed to be running damage control.
This was how it looked in the first draft and I’ve underlined the offending “wondered” statement. After cleaning it up, this is the result:
“Grades aren’t finalized, of course,” Mrs. Young said quickly and my palms broke out in sweat. She was running damage control.
Instead of Sammy being suspicious that her teacher might be running damage control, in the new version, she KNOWS she is. It’s punchier, it’s more nerve-wracking, and it’s less words. Here’s another example:
I felt the tears that sprung to my eyes as she told me to go find my sisters.
You can see where this one is headed already. “I felt” detracts from the sentence and makes it a telling sentence rather than a showing one. Instead, consider:
Tears sprung to my eyes as she told me to go find my sisters.
So here is where “Control-F” comes in. Use it to find and assess every “felt”, “thought”, “wondered” statement and decide if they can be removed. There will be cases where they are better off left in, especially in dialogue when a character might want to express hesitancy. It’s down to your discretion to figure out where these statements work and where they detract from your writing.
STEP 5: Search and destroy crutch words! Crutch words are the words that help us keep our flow when drafting. They are often colloquial and reflect how we might talk in real life but they bog our writing down with extra words that weaken the prose. The main offenders will probably be words like “Almost” and “Just”.
Think about phrases like “almost fell” and “almost smiled”. These phrases are dangerous because you are telling the reader the character didn’t fall, but that is now what they are imagining. Instead, think about words like “stumbled” and “slipped”. They are less words than “almost fell” and paint a better picture for the reader.
Crutch words and phrases exist in dialogue, too. It can be hard to convince yourself to get rid of them, especially considering that with dialogue, it should be okay to be more conversational! We want our characters sound like real people, after all. However, search for words like “yeah”, “hey”, and “you know”. Again, these words and phrases ARE allowed to exist in your dialogue, but you should still evaluate it wherever you’ve used them!
Other words to consider cutting:
-Very
-Really
-Somewhat
-Rather
-There was
-Suddenly
-That
STEP 6: Remove redundant directional description! This involves searching for words like “down”, “forward”, “back”, and “up”. Often times, these words are redundant. Check out the example below from DELTA:
Reiner sidestepped my attack with ease but momentum carried me forward. The blow to my back knocked me down onto my knees.
This example is tricky and I’ve underlined both “forward” and “down”. One of these is fine, but the other is redundant and should be removed. This is the line how it currently exists in DELTA:
Reiner sidestepped my attack with ease but momentum carried me forward. The blow to my back knocked me to my knees.
“Forward” remains because Sammy’s momentum could realistically be pulling her in any direction. However, “down” gets removed. It’s redundant because we know she’s on her feet and ends up on her knees. The only direction she could’ve moved was down. The reader doesn’t need to be told “down” to know that’s how she moved.
STEP 7: Dialogue tags! These are tricky and controversial. Some writers will tell you to delete them entirely. I believe they have a time and place. Start simple. Search for “said”. Find instances where it is combined with an action and remove “said” entirely. Here’s a DELTA example:
“Samantha, you were there last night,” Madison said, flipping her cherry-red hair over her shoulder. “What did you see?”
We have the dialogue tag (“she said”) and an action (“flipping her cherry-red hair…). We know Madison is talking, so this isn’t a place we need to include her dialogue tag. This leaves us with:
“Samantha, you were there last night,” Madison flipped her cherry-red hair over her shoulder. “What did you see?”
The line is pretty much the same, but we’ve removed a single unnecessary word! It might seem like pointless work, removing one word at a time like this, but they add up and like I said earlier, it WILL make your voice as an author shine.
FINAL STEP: Go back to Step 3 and evaluate line by line. Unfortunately, “control-F” will only get us so far. Sometime it really does come down to reading each line and figuring out how to simplify it. It may feel painstaking and difficult at first, but you’ll get better with practice. If you’re a weirdo like me, you might even enjoy the work. It becomes a puzzle. What can I cut? What can I compress? What do I not need?
Remember, you got this!