Cutting All Those Unnecessary Words

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. ~William Strunk, Jr.

Oh, the joys of editing. Actually, editing is the easiest part for me when I’m writing. Of course, I have to admit that I find editing and rewriting much more pleasant when it’s my idea than when someone else says this or that needs changing. But I can usually work in those edits too.

For my current story, my publishers had contracted with me to write a 90,000 to 100,000 word novel. Yes, that’s a lot of words. And yes, I am a wordy person as you know if you visit my blog often. I like words. I like to put them together. Sometimes it takes me too many words to write a story. This time I ended up 12,656 words over the 100,000 I agreed to. Sigh. But I knew there would be plenty of fluff words and scenes that could be shortened or slashed. I’ve been to this too wordy story world before. Now I’ve edited through my story a couple of times now and have eliminated over 9,000 of those unnecessary words. Well, actually I cut more than that, but I also added a few words here and there. So I’m down to only 3,500 extra words now. Maybe I can slide those extras past my editor if I tell her they are all very short words. 🙂

Mark Twain wrote for magazines back when they paid by the word for stories. I wrote a few like that when I began writing years ago and I came across this quote way back then. It makes perfect sense while making me smile.

“I never write ‘metropolis’ for seven cents when I can write ‘city’ and get paid the same.” ~Mark Twain

See, I could edit that last paragraph out if I was trying to cut words. It’s not really necessary, but I’m leaving it in. The beauty of a blog and patient readers.

Back to getting rid of fluff. I edit on a word processor now. You try something and don’t like it, you hit the delete key and it’s gone. Sometimes you wish it back after it’s too late to hit those recover keys. Then you have to rewrite it. So the delete key can be your enemy as well as your friend. My delete key is more friend than enemy since I do have that tendency to be wordy. Sometimes I’ll reword a sentence a dozen times and then zap it with the delete key. That was what was needed in the beginning.

Before I entered the computer age, I wrote my stories on a typewriter. Then I could edit the hard copy. Slash out a sentence here and scribble a new sentence in the space between the lines or sometimes in the margins. This page is from one of my kids’ books, Discovery at Coyote Point. I usually take the page with me when I give talks at schools so the kids can see that it’s okay to spill a story on paper and then go back and make it better.

That’s what I’m trying to do with the book I’m writing now. Make it better by eliminating those unnecessary words. I want to trust my reader enough that I don’t push the same idea at them a half dozen times. I want that reader to slide right into my story and live the story with my characters without slowing him or her down with superfluous words. (Mark Twain would have found a shorter word!)

And that’s why I’m wearing out my delete key to trim all but the necessary words.

Have you ever read a book you thought had some of those unnecessary words?