For every author desperate to trim your book’s word count, there’s another author who insists every word is precious. After all, a book wouldn’t have turned out long if it didn’t need to be long.

Sometimes that true. If Charles Dickens had whacked away at his word count (not that he would, since he was paid by the installment), we would never have enjoyed such sprawling delights as Bleak House and Dombey and Son. If modern-day wordsmiths such as fantasy maestro Patrick Rothfuss hadn’t been turned loose upon the page, we would never get to sample the luxurious delights of his 800+ page Kingkiller explorations.

The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss (affiliate link)

In short, there’s a time and a place for hefty word counts.

But there’s also a reason we still quote that pithy proverb:

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Here’s the bottom line: whether the end result of your book be long or short, every word must exist for a consciously sought and approved reason.

As we discussed last week, in Part 1, there are several good reasons for wanting to cull word count. Not least among those reasons is simply making the book better. What author doesn’t desire that?

Last week, I showed you five ways to edit your book’s word count on the macro level by evaluating your:

• Subplots
• Characters
• Scenes
• Sequels
• “Explanations”

If you followed my advice, you probably already found large chunks of your book that you could easily streamline. Today, we’re going to take that a step farther, and I’m going to show you how you can up your word-chopping game and revise your way to a better story by focusing on micro editing.

How to Trim Your Book’s Word Count: On the Micro Level

Once you’ve whacked all the big, obvious junk from your story, you can start focusing on the not-so-obvious stuff. Since I had very little macro stuff I could cut in my historical-superhero work-in-progress Wayfarer, micro editing was my only hope for trimming my gargantuan 200,000-word first draft.

It can be overwhelming to look at your mountain of a first draft and know you’re going to have to somehow tunnel through it, using mainly spoons (aka, one word at a time). But it’s surprising how much unnecessary filler exists on the sentence level.

Using only the five methods listed below, I cut 40,000 words from my manuscript. Not too shabby.

1. Glue Words

As I was preparing to start this post, Wordplayer Jeriann Fisher serendipitously messaged me on Facebook, asking if I’d ever done a post on “sticky sentences.” As per grammar checker ProWritingAid, “sticky sentences” are:

…ones containing a high percentage of glue words. Glue words are the 200 or so most common words in English (excluding the personal pronouns). Glue words are generally used to link nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives.

In short, these are words that simply don’t add much to the story. Here’s the list I used for Wayfarer‘s edit:

• Asked
• Begin/Began/Beginning
• Breath
• Could
• Exhale
• Feel/Felt
• Glance/Glanced/Glancing
• Hear
• Inhale
• Just
• Look
• -ly
• Moment
• Replied
• Said
• See/Saw/Seeing
• Seemed
• -self (his-, her-, your-, my-, it-)
• Smell
• Sound
• Start
• Taste
• That
• Think/Thought/Thinking
• Touch
• Turn
• Very
• Wonder

Run a universal Find/Replace through your document and replace every instance of these words with the same word all in caps (e.g., “he wondered” becomes “he WONDERed”). This will force you to actively notice and consider each instance of the word, instead of skimming over it obliviously.

Note, that not every instance of these words will be superfluous or incorrect. But you’ll find you can trim at least several hundred of these “glue” words from every chapter. That’s a sizable deduction over the entirety of a book. Your story will be the stronger for it.

2. Sticky Filler

Stickiness can infiltrate your book beyond solitary words. You also need to watch out for “sticky filler phrases.” Usually, these phrases are the result of “saying it twice where once will do.”

They include:

Two Descriptors

For Example: Her hair was golden like the sun, like corn silk.

Two Action Beats -or- Action Beat and Dialogue Tag

For Example: He nodded and took a swig from the bottle. “I know what you mean,” he said.

Mechanics of a Motion

For Example: He shrugged his shoulders, then clapped his hands.

She reached her hand for the jar on the top shelf.

He reached to poke her.

She sat down, and he stood up.

 3. Repetitive Dialogue

Talking Around the Subject

Dialogue is one thing you can’t outline–which means even when you know the shape of a conversation before writing it, you still have to find your way through the give-and-take of the actual conversation’s evolution–which means that most character conversations end up a little more rambly than they need to be.

Examine each of your dialogue scenes. Locate the heart of the conversation. What is the one red-hot point the scene is working toward? Now, go back and make sure all the dialogue leading up to that point in funneling right to it.

Eliminate Repetition

In Wayfarer, I had one important dialogue scene that needed to cover a lot of ground. Pretty much everything the characters said was important, but it wasn’t well organized. Instead of resolving one point before moving on, I had let the conversation jump to another important topic, then circle back around to the previous topic.

To combat this, I divided my chapter into sub-files in Scrivener and labeled each file with its section’s “subject” within the conversation. Then I rearranged the pieces, so the flow of the conversation was more cohesive–which kept the characters from having to unnecessarily repeat themselves.

Chop Dialogue Fillers

Story dialogue is not like real-life dialogue. It doesn’t have to hem and haw. It doesn’t need fillers for the sake of realism. Cut words such as:

• Ah
• Er
• Huh
• Uh
• Um
• Well
• What?
• You know

For more, see this post: Want Fantastic Dialogue? Flee These 6 Fearsome Fillers

In trimming dialogue, be careful not to endanger the voice of individual characters. Sometimes the “right” way to say something is not the way a particular character would actually say it. For example, my Cockney sidekick character has the dialogue tic of ending many of her statements as questions. It would have required fewer words to drop the tic, but it wouldn’t have been true to the character.

4. Repetitive Narrative

Just like dialogue, the narrative you write when in the stage of “figuring out” your story can end up walking a drunken line. Watch out for places where you:

1. Repeat the same information in the same scene (as in my “circling back” example above in the “Repetitive Dialogue” section).

2. Repeat the same information multiple times through the book (e.g., an important story is recounted to more than one character).

3. Repeat the characters’ feelings or motivations–without evolving them.

5. Contextual Overkill

Finally, watch out for pieces of informative dialogue and narrative that are rendered unnecessary by the context. Here’s a paragraph I deleted from Wayfarer:

As always, the words were out before he’d properly considered them. Was he ten kinds of fool? All these questions aside, this was his chance. Right here in this room, everything he’d ever wanted from life was coming true in an instant. He would never gain another patron such as Mr. Madoc. The man had been nothing but solicitous and forthright with him from the moment they met.

This is a nice little chunk of seventy words–all of which are unnecessary because readers will already either know or be able to deduce the character’s realizations and motivations, thanks to the overall context of this and preceding scenes.

Figuring out how to trim your book’s word count probably isn’t going to be your favorite writing chore. But armed with these methods for macro and micro word trimming, you can cut tens of thousands of unnecessary words from your story. Even if your book isn’t grossly overweight, all these tricks will help you turn out a tighter, more streamlined, better story. Happy trimming!

Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! What’s your favorite method for how to trim your book’s word count on the macro level? Tell me in the comments!

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