“Trim the words but keep the story.” – Martha Reed
This
month I enjoyed a challenging writing craft exercise. Answering an open call
for a new crime fiction anthology, I decided to take a break from my current
novel-length WIP (work-in-progress) and try my hand at quickly drafting
something shorter.
The
anthology’s stated eligibility guidelines included a maximum threshold of five
thousand words. Usually, my short fiction drafts run short, and then I flesh out the story as needed from there. Imagine my
surprise when I sat back and discovered that my new draft manuscript clocked in
at six thousand words.
Yikes! And
this was my short story in its roughest form. Somehow I needed to delete almost twenty percent.
I found the idea of deleting one thousand words daunting. How did
I ‘kill my darlings’ and do it?
1.
The setting and the reason the characters were gathering was
to attend a family wedding. The introductory paragraphs included a description
of the protagonist’s trip to get to the wedding and what she saw as she
approached the venue. First, I deleted all of that travel description. As the
writer, I needed to know the wedding details, but it was unnecessary information for
the reader. With this ruthless edit, I dropped the reader straight into the
action. Then, in a final desperate act, I deleted the bride. (Never fear, I
sent Callie to Aruba to enjoy her honeymoon.)
2.
Next, I deleted other unnecessary characters (apologies to
Benton Overbeck and the Big House staff members). I needed to shut my eyes to
make this edit because I adored reading about these funny and oddball people. I
had spent hours having fun imagining them and the trouble they were getting
into, especially the hired bagpiper who got caught stealing Junior Senior’s Cuban
cigars. In the end, calling the wedding venue ‘a madhouse’ was all the
description that the story really needed.
3. I ruthlessly
deleted descriptive adjectives. In the original manuscript I created a ‘cozy
reading nook’ which included a tasseled silk-upholstered chaise longue plush
with needlepointed pillows, a marble fireplace filled with sweet pine logs
ready for a rare but chilly Florida winter night, and a Tiffany stained-glass floor
lamp. I kept the chaise longue because my protagonist needed something to sit
on, but bye-bye Italian marble fireplace and the Tiffany dragonfly lamp.
In the
end, after too many delicious pots of coffee and three intensely satisfying
days of joyful editing, I hit the mark at 4,998 words.
How
about you? Share your editing tricks for trimming those pesky and unnecessary
words.
And, in case you’re interested, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Pittsburgh Sisters in Crime is hosting an open call for short crime fiction for “Gold Bridges, Dark Rivers,” our new anthology. Visit our website www.pghsinc.com for the eligibility guidelines, sharpen your pencils, and good luck!
Throat clearing chapters, paragraphs, and sentences are the first to go. They are either unneeded background, unneeded motion (getting to and fro), or expository that has been or will be demonstrated by action. I guess that's about 5% of my first draft.
ReplyDeleteHi Jim - "Throat clearing" is a great description. My beloved editor Ramona Long used to call it "Yabba Dabba Do" using the way Fred Flintstone used to get himself ready to go. I'm probably dating myself with the FF reference. LOL.
DeleteI start with a distant visual image and narrow the focus until the 5000 word mark. I'm in familiar territory with the dimension of the plot, number of characters, and a setting that enhances the plot.
ReplyDeleteMargaret this is interesting. I haven't considered this tool before. If you have an idea on the plot, the characters, and a setting, what "distant visual image" are you narrowing your focus on? Is the image what you're imagining the finished story will look like?
DeleteTwo women, one tall, one short, are walking on a sidewalk just after a winter dawn. One carries two cardboard boxes of pastries and the other, a reusable thermal container of coffee. Who are they, where are they going, and what do they find? Enhance the focus. What are they talking about? Bam! action time. For 5000 words, I get them inside a building and crime discovery on the first page.
DeleteOne of my first truly valuable bits of advice from an established author was to eliminate the "ride in the car to the crime" portion with "As I arrived..." For me, it resists the temptation to do an info dump to set up the story. Cuts right to the action and is easier on word limits. Necessary information can be incorporated as the story unfolds.
ReplyDeleteHi Kathleen - great advice. I've also been told to eliminate any scene when the characters sit down to eat a full meal. My workaround is to send them to a coffeeshop!
DeleteGreat suggestions, Martha, thank you. My problem is just the opposite. As a former technical writer, I am so accustomed to writing lean. It takes me a long time to get to the word count I need for a novel. I have to see what happens if I have to work with a word limitation for a short story.
ReplyDeleteHi Grace - When I first started writing creative fiction, I had the lean and mean problem too, mainly because that's how I was taught to write in Journalism school. Over the course of my business career, I kept the lean habit for corporate communications, especially for emails, and then retrained my inner voice to relax and follow a more musical form of storytelling for my creative work. Hey, whatever works!
DeleteLoved reading how you deleted paragraphs to get your story down to the required length. You were coming from writing a novel, which has an inherently slower pace.
ReplyDeleteHi Marilyn - You're right - those two formats have completely different requirements! I've been bingeing on crafting short stories lately, and I wonder if what I'm enjoying the most about it is the necessity of precisely choosing exactly the right word. But I'll keep doing it because - for instance in my latest draft - changing one word from "saved" to "redeemed" put an entirely different spin on it and brought up a new and important theme.
DeleteThank you for your objectivity in being able to eliminate irrelevant descriptions. I find that there are a lot of authors who spend so much time in giving details that they forget about the story. They frequently continue using other colors or styles to describe the same objects or people later on. This information usually wasn’t needed the first time and certainly didn’t do anything for the plot the second time.
ReplyDeleteI’m sure it is difficult to remove words or phrases that you wrote to enhance what you are trying to say. If you look at it from the reader’s perspective they probably would just skip over the extraneous parts, I know I do. If there is too much I might even lose interest in the whole story. Sometimes I think the author was just trying to add to their word count.
Agreed! I also wonder if writers get in a rush to finish it off when another editing cycle might tighten the story and make it even better.
DeleteBeen there, done that, have the t-shirt, Martha.
ReplyDeleteThis open call is giving me fits. I thought I had a premise, but the more I thought about it, the less enamored I became. So, I'm back to square one with my muse saying, "Nope. I want to focus on the novel."
I’ve negotiated a truce with my muse by promising that taking a short story break will freshen me up and make my new novel better. Let’s see if it works. Lol.
DeleteA perfect master class, Martha. This sounds like a great short story.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I switch from the author’s eye to a reader’s eye and cut the extras. Most often I find they are the words I was most attached to, but definitely not necessary.
Hi Kait! It took me awhile to separate the two eyes but now my editing eye feels right and it’s ruthless.
DeleteHonestly, I find short stories more challenging than novels! I must be too verbose...
ReplyDeleteHi Lori - I look at it like two different kinds of musical instruments, say a stringed one versus a piano. Same story ending, two different approaches (and maybe two different talents).
DeleteGreat suggestions, and I do much the same. Get the story out and then go back and revise, cut, revise, and repeat. I have also taken a break from my WIP (except for my critique group submissions) to focus on these anthology calls for short stories - so many all at once. It's difficult for me to switch worlds in the same day. Write on!
ReplyDelete