Writers Plot: CUTTING WORDS

Posted by Sheila Connolly and Sarah Atwell

For the last few weeks I have been in intense edit mode for a book that's due (electronically, thank goodness) on Tuesday. It's a book I actually wrote in 2004, before I had sold anything. It's set in a Philadelphia museum where I worked for several years. I circulated it to agents, and one agent came back with some excellent suggestions for making it better–like including a murder. Oh. Right. So I rewrote it with the murder of a character who was already in the book. I resubmitted it to that agent, but ultimately she passed on it. However, I never throw anything away, and a couple of months ago I pitched it to Berkley and they bought the book, in a three-book deal.

This should be easy, I thought. After all, I had the first book written, and I'm just overflowing with ideas for sequels. There's only one problem: Book 1 (still unnamed) was too long. The contract specified 70,000 to 80,000 words. Book 1 was 102,000.

Sarah and I had no problems with the Glassblowing Series–the books there all came in nicely at around 78,000 words. The Orchard Series? Well, I'll admit I fudged a little, and they're all over 80,000, but not by a lot. But 102,000? Not happening. Which meant I had to do some serious editing.

I write long. When I first started writing, I had no clue how long a book was supposed to be. I just sat down and wrote. I remember pulling a mystery book at random from my bookshelf and literally counting the words on the page and the number of pages. That was long before I knew about writers groups and on-line loops, and I'm not sure I even knew that my word processing program had a "word count" function. I simply told the story until it ended. Luckily that turned out to be book length. Looking back, I find that the shortest thing I've ever written was my second book, a sweet romance set in Ireland, at 66,000 words. All the others topped 80,000 words–and, once I got rolling, they started creeping past 90,000, and then 100,000.

But there are conventions in the book business: cozies short, and thrillers and suspense are longer. I write cozies, ergo my books should be kind of short. There are probably lots of good reasons why this is true: some relate to physical production of the books, others to reader expectations. Publishers don't always share these tidbits with writers, but they do expect us to conform.

So Philadelphia Book 1 had to go on a starvation diet. Let me say I prefer whittling to padding. I think. I'd rather have something on the page to pare away than try to shoehorn a new subplot or some enriching description into existing text (and you know, either way, you're going to introduce some bloopers which will come back to embarrass you).

But cutting is still painful. A writer puts the words on the page for a reason. You're building characters; you're making a place come alive with sensory details; you're planting subtle clues. You love each and every word, because they're all yours and you strung them together. But at the same time, you can hear your editor's voice (Note: I love my editor–she knows what she's doing, and she invariably makes my books better) saying, "what is the point of this section?" "Why do we need this?" And worse, "you've said this before–can't you take one or the other out?"

The immature part of you says, "no, I don't wanna. I like those words/paragraph/subplot." You can dress it up and tell the editor things like, "I was expounding on the protagonist's issues with forming close relationships with other people based on her dysfunctional relationship with her father."

And the editor's appropriate response to all your blustering should be, "but does it advance the story?"' And often the answer is "no."

So I had to cut a whole lot of words out of my story. It hurts, no question. The first part to go was the "romance" aspect–the potential relationship with the law enforcement official (okay, it's cliche, but...). Take out all the drooling over his broad shoulders, all the enigmatic glances (does he? should I?). Take out a few juicy scenes, or tone them down. Still too long.

Then there were the chunks I label "look at how much I know!" This series is about museums, and I've worked in several. Unfortunately I have a tendency to show off my arcane knowledge. Some of this insider information might interest people who really want to know what goes on behind the scenes, so some of it stays. But not all of it. Stop showing off, Sheila. Slash, chop.

And then there are the lovely chunks of "thinking." My protagonists actually stop and think about what's going on, most often about how they're supposed to solve the murder. Thinking is good–now and then. But thinking falls under the dreaded "show, don't tell" umbrella, and it's kind of cheating, when you periodically review the evidence for the readers. Out comes the red pen again, axing entire paragraphs of thinking.

This doesn't mean that I don't ever get to add anything. Even in the best of times, I will stumble over a sentence I wrote and say, "what the heck did I mean by that?" And I also have a tendency to assume I've said something, but when I look for it it's not there. Maybe whatever I was trying to say was obvious to me, immersed in the book, but it's not going to be clear to a new reader.

So that's what I've been doing for weeks now–taking a machete to my deathless prose. Pretty words? Bah! Throw them overboard. Longing glances? Not in my mystery! As of yesterday, my bloated 102,000-word book was down to a lean 90,000 words and change, and I've got one more pass to make before I push the button and send it off to my editor. That's 12% of the book that has fallen to my sword, er, pen. Is it a better book now? I think so. It's clearer, cleaner, and it comes closer to telling the story I wanted before I buried it in words. I think it's working–and I hope my editor agrees.