Jill Murray

I was working my way through a revision of my b-girl novel and kind of sweating over its ever-expanding length when the following question came into my inbox from Chrisa, regarding her thesis.

DO I?

Why yes. In no particular order, I suggest the following tactics. Some of these are sillier than others, but all of them will result in a reduced word count, if that is what you are going for.

• put it down and go back to it days or weeks later with fresh eyes
• look for verbal ticks and kill them one by one– for instance, I tend to write “just” a lot, which is bad because it minimizes whatever else is in the sentence. So I always have to go back and kill all the justs. Same thing with “seems.” Is it or isn’t it? I need to make up my mind.
• adopt the most direct tone possible.
• pare your ideas down to the absolute minimum statement necessary to make a good paper. If you have more to say about something, cut it and paste it to a new document and use it to write another paper later.
• turn similes into metaphors to lose the “like a”
• replace a few small words with one big word
• hyphenate
• look for sentences that can be reorganized to contain fewer words
• cut any paragraph that doesn’t directly support your arguments, or that supports something that’s already adequately justified by something else
• find ways to annex info to appendixes
• adopt a shoot-to-kill mentality
• accept that you’re going to have to cut some good writing to make it happen
• look for more efficient ways to organize whole chapters, thus eliminating the need for some segues
• combine many cutting tactics so it feels systematic
• keep reminding yourself that the more you cut, the more valuable each remaining word will be

I find that once I accept the need to cut and get into cutting, it eventually becomes enjoyable. I like editing more than the initial drafting.