A story I shared at school visits was about my first book sale. I’d submitted a 40-48 page middle grade chapter book. Soon, my editor asked if I’d be willing to revise it to be included in a new series of historical fiction books. Being a newbie, I was afraid to say no, so I agreed. The change? Make it a young adult novel of about 200 pages!
I’ll describe some of the work it entailed another time. Instead, let’s not talk about making things longer, but shorter. After resubmitting the manuscript multiple times for editing and comments, the final product was about 230 pages. I had my story. The problem? All the books in the series had to be similar in length: about 175 pages. How to hang on to its essence and cut nearly 60 pages from the manuscript? There are several ways to do this.
1) Get rid of extraneous description. In an earlier post I suggested that adding description can bring clarity to your story. For example, I said,
The dog ran.
can be clarified to
That first morning on the lake, the chocolate Labrador ran joyfully into the clear water.
But you can add too much detail. What if my sentence read:
That first June morning on the pristine lake, the championship-winning brown chocolate Labrador Retriever ran joyfully into the clear, crisp spring-fed water.
It’s easy to see that’s a bit overdone. Previous context might have shown that it’s spring. If the lake is pristine, it follows the water is clear. A chocolate lab is brown. And, who cares if the dog won some prizes? Do prizes change the fact that it will soon just be another wet dog? Trust your reader to figure it out.
2) Only include what’s needed. I've always loved this quote attributed to Anton Chekhov: “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” When presenting a character, it isn’t necessary to describe everything she might be wearing. Is that frock or button important to understanding the character or what she looks like? Or, is the shoe buckle the murder weapon?
3) Find a shorter way to say it. “Private first class” can be shortened to “the soldier.” “She hugged and squeezed the distraught child” could be changed to “she embraced...”
4) Cut ruthlessly. Eliminate unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. Let punctuation help you:
“Get out of my castle!” the giant yelled.
works just as well as:
“Get out of my castle!” the enormous man yelled threateningly.
Do I follow my own advice? Yup. My first draft of this post was 581 words long. I know you’re busy. I’ve vowed never to post anything over 500 words. You’ve just read 459.
(Image by Stockking on Freepik).
# Tightening your work; #making cuts
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