I’m a Maniac, Maniac in Word

And I’m cutting words like I’ve never cut them before!

I’m so incredibly excited that I’m on the verge of putting on that song from Flashdance really loud and dancing around the house to it.

Do you know how, at least on a Mac, your Word document’s word count appears at the bottom of the window? Do you know how after you’ve surpassed 100,000 words, that word count just ups and disappears?

Well, mine came back!

Before:

After:

Hello old friend!

Now when I send out my query letters, I can say that my word count is approx. 99,000 and it won’t even be like I’m rounding down from 99,999 (Not that I would ever really do that...*shifty eye, shifty eye*). It is honestly and truly well under 100,000. Mischief Managed! I think I deserve a cookie.

You know what? I’m buying myself a box of cookies.

Or maybe a bunch of cupcakes eating a bunch of cookies...

The Future’s So Bright I Wear My Sunglass At Night

It’s a bright and shiny new year! And in case you can’t tell, I’ve got my optimistic-(delusional?)-colored glasses on! Woo! (You have to imagine the little kick and fist in the air that accompanies that “woo!” because there is definitely a little kick and fist in the air that accompanies it.)

The plan for this year? Get an agent! And of course, everything is going to go according to plan… (Here’s where you might want to mental insert a manic smile.)

I’ve waited out the holidays and shall soon be querying. (Beware select agents: EXTREME AWESOMENESSS will be coming to an inbox near you!!) First though, I must finish cutting down my word count. I know, I know. I started this a million years ago. Shouldn’t I be finished already? How long does it take to cut 3,000 words? Well, it takes a while when one is carefully considering every word of their manuscript backwards page by page. And also when you have Christmas, Second Christmas and anime binges to see to.

At the start of the year, it’s hard not to look back at where I was this time last year or the year before. Writing, re-writing, waiting for rejections from agents… everything takes time! What is up with that? It’s seems like it takes forever to make progress. That why I like to look back. I’m able to say, “Hey, take a gander at that. I did reach milestone or two.”

January 2010: I’d been at the bookstore a few months and other then the part where I had to recommend certain books whether I liked them or not (Thank God they put an end to that program!), I quite liked it there!

As far as writing, I’d started querying (prematurely) in the fall, having finished two manuscripts after eighteen months of dedicated and (let’s call it) focused writing. Little did I realize I’d be spending the next year working on re-write after re-write, after re-write. (Alas and alack, I was so young and naive then.) In fact, as I write this I’m looking at date that I’d sent out my first query and I’m thinking to myself, “Really? Just a year ago?”

January 2009: I was at a job that was so wrong for me that every morning I secretly wished I’d get hit by at car so I’d have an excuse not to go into the office. Not a bad accident that required broken limbs or, you know, death. I just wanted to get hit enough. I wanted to be able to call in and say, “I got hit by a car. I’m not coming in.” without it being a lie.

As far as the bestselling novels I was working on (my strategy from the beginning has been that if I call them bestselling then by way of self-fulfilling prophesy, one day they’d have to become just that), I was writing regularly, if not everyday. I’d set a daily writing goal in relation to how many words/pages I thought I had left to write. Some days I was under, but other days I was way over so I figured it averaged out. Even if it didn’t, the point was I was always writing.

January 2008: I had just finished college the month before. I had a job lined up (see 2009) and I told myself that I was going to pick one of my novel ideas and see it through to a complete manuscript. After a few months, that turned into: I’m going to pick two story ideas and see them through to complete manuscripts.

And so here we are in 2011. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got my stunna shades on.

Big Picture, Little Picture

Word count. It’s one of those big little things, isn’t it? In the overall craft of writing, it’s not something that is emphasized; and with good reason what with all the plot, characterization, dialogue and etc to be mastered. But, from what I’ve read, for some agents word count can be a cause for query insta-rejection. I believe you should write as many words as is necessary to effectively tell your story, no more and no less. At the same time, I also believe that if you can do something to give an agent one less reason to reject you, why not give it a go? I mean, as long you’re revising your manuscript anyway.

I’ve worked hard to get my word count down. What was once 126,000 words, is now somewhere in the neighborhood of 103,000. Most of that was accomplished by big-picturing things. Is this scene really necessary or does it simply accomplish the same goals as this other, slightly better scene? Does this description of the setting really have to be seven-pages long? Did I really describe that character at length in two different places?

The best big picture piece of advice I came across this year, which helped me cut out a hugeormous chunk of words, came from Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel. In chapter eight, Maass talks about set up. Basically, he says get rid of it. I thought about it, looked at my first few chapters, and then had a revelation. By golly! The first fifty-sixty pages weren’t nothing but a bunch of set up. While there were important ideas that I’d have to work into other parts of the manuscript, those pages could go away and wouldn’t be missed. That was at least 15,000 words gone in one fell swoop!

That’s not to say that deleting one sentence or one word at a time can’t be effective. For me this is especially true when I’ve written something in first person and have gotten a little too comfortable with, like, the conversational tone, you know.

This past year I’ve come across a couple of different posts and forum threads about fillers words. (Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten where exactly I’d found them so while I remember the lessons, I can’t link you to their sources.)

Upon compiling my list of filler words, I did a search in my Word document based on that list just to see how many of each I used. Here were some of my biggest offenders:

Just: 453

Like: 627

That: 1,462! (To be fair there are a lot of times that using “that” is justified. *shifty eyes, shifty eyes*)

I then used the "find" function to locate each word individually and made the difficult decision on a case by case basis of whether or not my entire manuscript would fall apart if I let go of this one “just” or “like” or whichever word I happened to be considering.

Now, any time I’m re-reading my manuscript I have a list of words I try to keep an eye out for. I’ve added to the list specific things I’m particularly guilty of.

The Usual Suspects:

Seem

There were

They were

Well

Kind of

Like

Somehow

You know

I mean

Just

Okay

Managed

Kevin Spacey

I guess

Suddenly

That

Very

So

Really

Little

Even

Adverbs ending “ly”

“But” or “And” at the start of a sentence.

Additional suggested filler words that didn’t turn up a whole lot in my manuscript:

At all

Truly

Rather

Definitely

Certainly

Find out how many times you’ve used these words in your manuscript. This only goes to show what little words can do!

But here’s my favorite tip about cutting words that has helped me focus on the little picture. A while ago Janice Hardy posted a blog about cutting down your word count. Her suggested strategy was, “If you need to cut words, decide how many you need to cut, then divide that by the number of pages [in your manuscript].”

It’s such a simple and straightforward approach that I never in a million years would have though to do it. I decided to try this out in order to get my manuscript under the 100,000 mark. After all the cutting I’d already done, finding another 3,000 words to give their final notice felt like as big an undertaking as cutting 23,000 words. I did the math and it turns out I only need to get rid of seven or eight words per page. ONLY SEVEN OR EIGHT WORDS! How super doable is that? So super doable that I’ve been getting rid of way more words per page than my quota requires. Even on an end-of-chapter page that only had three or four lines total, I still found a handful of words I didn’t need. Think about it. Doesn't "he said" work just as well as, if not better than, "he told me"? Bam! Minus one word from your tally.

A personal tip: I started from the last page and worked backwards page by page. This puts things out of the flow of the narrative and allows me to be more objective on a line-by-line basis.

There’s a value to this practice that goes beyond cutting words. As I’ve been deciding which scenes, chapters, sentences and words can go, I couldn’t help but pay attention to and form a critical opinion on how all the different macro- and micro-pieces of my manuscript do or don’t work together. Making an effort to cut words not only gives me a more attractive word count, it forces me to look at the quality of my writing on two levels: Big picture and little picture.

What about you, my fellow writers? What have been your favorite writing/editing tips of 2010?