WOW! Women On Writing Blog: reducing your manuscript's word count

Thursday, June 27, 2024

In my experience, tight writing is marketable writing. In part this is because I write for the school library market. A biography for fourth graders may be only 2500 words long. Some of you write essays that dwarf that word count! But flash writers also face tight word counts. The cut off for a flash piece may be only 750 or even 250 words.

So, what do you do when your draft is too long? One of the things that I discuss with my nonfiction students is how to tighten their writing. If it is only a little bit too long, searching out problem words and phrasing may be enough. These might include:

START and BEGIN. At one point in my writing life, these two words were my personal weakness. I was always announcing that something was about to happen. “As the admitting nurse started to process his paperwork …” Nope. Just let it happen. “The admitting nurse processed his paperwork and …”

These aren’t the only words that announce something is taking place. In your own work, you might look for ALREADY, EVEN, EXACTLY, FINALLY, JUST THEN, NOW, and SUDDENLY. I’m not saying that you should never use these words. Just make certain they aren’t hiding wordy construction.

Another group of words that you might be able to revise away are imprecise words. They include ALMOST, APPEARS, APPROXIMATELY, BASICALLY, CLOSE TO, EVENTUALLY, NEARLY, PRACTICALLY, and SEEMS. Again, I’m not saying you should never use these words. When something isn’t exact, I must use the word approximately. But in general, it is better to be specific. If the noise “seems really loud” why not say that it “is thunderous”?

You may also need to cut -LY adverbs. “Quietly walk” could become tiptoe. Is something “largely unseen” or is it “hidden”?

Sometimes I need to cut one-third or even half of the total. That’s the case with the chapter I am revising today. Each chapter should be 500 words long. The first draft of chapter five came in at 760 words.

I know that I can do it. But one of the problems with cutting a significant percentage of the word count is that the final piece often feels choppy. The best way to avoid this isn’t to cut. It is to start over.

Whoa! Calm down!

When I’ve already drafted a piece, I know where it needs to go, and I know I don’t have space for anything extra. If I start over again, my draft will be tight, and it won’t feel like something is missing. Sometimes I open a blank document and start from scratch. Other times I open a blank document and copy over two or three paragraphs at a time. Then I set about finding shorter, tighter ways to give much of the same information. I’m not sure why, but it works.

How do you go about revising when you have to make big cuts?

--SueBE

Sue Bradford Edwards' is the author of over 55 books for young readers.

To find out more about her writing, visit her site and blog, One Writer's Journey.
Click here to find her newsletter.

She is also the instructor for 3 WOW classes which begin again on July 1, 2024. She teaches:

4 comments cutting words from a story, reducing your manuscript's word count, revision, Sue Bradford Edwards, word count

How to Break up a Long Memoir

Saturday, July 16, 2022

By Bobbie Christmas

Q: After five years I have completed my autobiography. After submitting many query letters with the word count of 777,568 I have been informed that as a new author no one is going to take a chance and publish me, because the cost would be great. I am told the book should not be more than 90,000 words. How can you help me to condense my book, and what would the cost be?

A: The advice you received is correct, that publishers prefer most first-time authors to keep their books at or under 100,000 words. Because the length of a manuscript affects the cost to produce it as a book, publishers rarely accept manuscripts of 500,000 words or more, unless the author is already established and has a strong fan following.

You have put a great deal of work into your book, though, and deleting about 90 percent of your words could be heartbreaking, if not impossible. I feel for you and I can help, but not right away. Let me explain.

I help authors, rather than scalp them, so let me make some comments and suggestions. Because I, like most editors, charge by the word, you can save a great deal of money by reducing the word count yourself before sending the book for editing, but wait! You won’t have to cut out almost 700,000 words if you follow my advice.

First, is the book an actual autobiography? Autobiographies cover the lives of celebrities, politicians, and other well-known people. Autobiographies reveal personal information that readers want to know about the subject’s life history, how the person grew up, what drawbacks the person faced, how that person overcame adversity, and in what way the subject of the book finally triumphed. If the author is, however, simply an ordinary person who led an interesting life but is not a famous person, then it must be labeled a memoir, rather than an autobiography.

If indeed it is a memoir, we’re in luck. Memoirs give authors many ways and opportunities to break their manuscripts into several. Rather than being a straight timeline and litany of facts like an autobiography, memoirs can be separated into stories about specific incidents. For example, I’ve broken my memoirs into three books by making one strictly about my life with animals. One is about unusual or funny incidents that happened to me at work. A third one covers odd or hilarious events I’ve experienced in my dating life.

In your case, perhaps one manuscript can concentrate on interesting incidents that happened to you during your youth and teen years. A second manuscript could cover events when you were in your twenties. Other manuscripts could concentrate on your thirties, and so forth. After you’ve broken the document into five or more manuscripts, you can go through each one and decide which chapters or incidents are the weakest, least interesting, or least important and delete them.

Next you can read books such as mine, Write In Style, to learn which words and phrases you can find and delete to make the writing even tighter and stronger.

Soon you’ll find you’ve reduced the single manuscript of more than 777,000 words into five or more tightly written memoirs that may be closer to 100,000 words each. Only then is it time to send one or more of the manuscripts for editing. Be sure to request that your editor also delete any weak segments or wordy phrases and make suggestions on how to cut down the word count even more. Not all editors will make such suggestions unless you ask them to do so.

I look forward to collaborating with you, but I want to give you the best deal for your dollar. If you can cut the book into at least four books, I can help with each one much easier and more economically than trying to cut the 777,000 words down to 100,000. In the end a much larger portion of your words and message will be preserved by breaking the one manuscript into several, and I’m sure you’ll be much happier, as well.

***

Bobbie Christmas is a book editor, author of Write In Style: Use Your Computer to Improve Your Writing, and owner of Zebra Communications. She will answer your questions too. Send them to Bobbie@zebraeditor.com or BZebra@aol.com. Read Bobbie’s Zebra Communications blog at https://www.zebraeditor.com/blog/.