Simply Too Many Words

Just cut a few and it'll be perfect...

Possibly because my family is full of creative people, we all adore this scene from the 1984 film Amadeus where Emperor Joseph II tells the young Mozart that his score “simply has too many notes…just cut a few and it will be perfect.” To which, a perplexed Mozart replies, “Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?”

As a creator, deleting is often more important than adding. But having put all this effort into putting down your words (or notes) in the first place, how do you know which ones to remove?

What to cut, and when

If you are still drafting, it’s too early to think about cutting words! As a chronic over-writer, I anxiously watch my word count swell in the drafting phase, knowing that what I end up with is going to be way too long. And, I have fallen into the very dastardly trap of stopping mid-draft to try and figure out how to streamline my plot in order to have a shorter (and more appropriate) word count at the end.

Don’t do this!

If you are drafting, try not to worry about having too many words. It will be much easier to have an honest evaluation of what to cut once you are all the way at the end of the draft and all your cards are on the table.

Photo by Ujesh Krishnan on Unsplash

Cutting is for revision.

If your completed manuscript has “too many words” for the standard of your genre, or if you are getting feedback from beta readers that the story drags, it may be time to do some cutting.

There are lots of ways you can remove words from a manuscript:

• Reducing use of dialogue tags, modifiers, or “hedge” words

• Checking that descriptions, backstory, and worldbuilding information is all relevant (and cutting anything that isn’t)

• Restructuring long-winded sentences to be shorter and more direct (when appropriate)

All of these techniques can be helpful, but they should happen near the END of your revision process, after your manuscript has been through many passes already. Before you start scouring your manuscript for hedge words, adverbs, or any other syntactical bogeymen, you should first evaluate your manuscript from the scene level.

Too many scenes?

If your manuscript is thousands (or tens of thousands) of words too long, deleting every instance of “almost” and “very” isn’t going to cut it. (See what I did there?) Lots of manuscripts (regardless of length) will have scenes in early drafts that just don’t do enough to move the story forward.

So, before you evaluate your manuscript at the local word level, first check it out from a global scene level. You may find you have scenes (or scene fragments) that can be cut entirely, or scenes that can be combined with each other.

Auditing the scenes in your story will do far more to streamline it than assiduously slashing adverbs.

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Here are some questions you can consider when evaluating whether a scene is necessary:

• What changes for the hero (or the reader) as a result of this scene?

  • If nothing changes, this scene might not be necessary! It can potentially be cut, or added to another scene.

• Does this scene present an obstacle towards the hero’s goal? Or help the hero make progress towards that goal?

  • If not: snip snip! Or, find another scene to combine it with.

• What information is shared in this scene? How critical is this information to the reader’s understanding of what happens next?

  • If the scene is only there to share information, is there another scene where that information can be shared instead?

• Can you lift this scene out of the narrative entirely without fundamentally changing the trajectory of the story? 

If you are having trouble answering that last question, here’s an exercise you can try:

1. For each scene in an arc, write a 1-2 sentence description of what happens in that scene on an index card or sticky note (virtual or real). 

2. Line up your index cards in order.

3. Take any scene you aren’t sure about out of the lineup and see if the cards that remain still form a logical story. If they do, then the scenes you pulled out can probably be cut!