Menu Close

Tag: writing tips

Editing: What if I’m Making it Worse?

Tracey Dyck 30 Comments


I was chatting about editing with the lovely Savannah a few days ago, and asked her what her top three editing struggles were. The first one she mentioned?

“FEARING THAT I’M ACTUALY MAKING IT WORSE. Like, this is the biggest problem I have and it has literally driven me crazy and made me want to stop editing period. ‘Cause I constantly scrutinize every bit and can’t decide whether I’m actually making things WORSE!”

Seeing as it’s been some time since I compiled any writing tips around here–and considering the fact that I’m drafting and thus, editing is creeping into my mind (it shouldn’t be, but it is)–this is perfect post material.

My first tip? Save every draft.

Every single one. You added a new character? Save that draft. You reworked the entire plot? Save that draft. You changed the formatting? SAVE IT. Now, I personally don’t go so far as to copy my story into a new document with every tiny change I make–that would be a waste of time–but every time I’ve worked through the book and made significant changes, I copy and paste it all into a new Word document. That way when I start a new round of edits, the old version is still there, safe and sound. If I hate the way an edited scene turns out, no problem. I can change it back to the old version. The Prophet’s Quest, for instance, is preserved in eight separate documents on my laptop (not counting the original paper copy, which is something you never, ever want to read–trust me).

On small scale edits, try it several different ways and compare.

If that pesky paragraph just won’t flow or that scene isn’t settling into place like you want it to, write it again. And again. And again, if you have to. Then compare the different angles. Which do you like better? Keep that one and either throw the rest away, or save them too, in a separate document for such snippets.

Sometimes it helps to read the different versions out loud.

Get another pair of eyes to help out if you can. A fresh opinion will often smooth things out.

On large scale edits, run with it until you hit a wall.

Something is off in your story, you can feel it. So you decide to change your long-lost prince into the disinherited son of a duke, with healing powers instead of telepathy. Obviously the whole story is going to change. On the cusp of making that editing call, it’s easy to be overcome with doubts. What if this change sucks? What if I rewrite the whole book and end up hating it? Guess what, buttercup? You won’t know until you try.

So begin editing. Rework the story to fit this new path. You may decide halfway down that, you know what? He really should be a prince after all. But maybe you’ll keep the healing powers so that he can save the life of the poisoned wine tester. Or maybe you’ll write all the way until the end of the story before realizing that. Or these edits will be exactly what your story needed. You have to start working to find out.


“But that’s so inefficient,” you say. “To spend all that time and energy only to scrap those words in the end! The horror!” Yes. It is inefficient. But it’s not a waste.

[source]

I should hope you don’t have to create that many drafts to get to the gem beneath the rock, but you get the picture. You may write thousands of words of a second draft before realizing you’re going at it all wrong and must start over. But those words were not a waste of time. You eliminated one option and so have a clearer idea of how to start over.

One of my long-time favorite writing “resource” (can you call a person a resource?) is author Gail Carson Levine. She has often mentioned how inefficient she is at writing, and how she’ll often produce pages upon pages, discover something is wrong, and have to start over. Sometimes those failed pages are necessary for you to dig into the layers of your story and work through a plot knot or develop your world building. It may not end up in the finished manuscript, but it’s a part of the process of getting to that finished manuscript.

Walk it out in your head.

At times, you won’t have to actually pick up your pencil or set fingers to keyboard to figure out if a proposed change will help or hinder your story. Sometimes the answer is obvious after a little thought. So before you do go change the first thirty thousand words of your WIP, stop and consider the effects of what you’re planning to edit. Every change you make, especially the big ones, has a domino effect on the rest of the story. (Or at least it should. If it doesn’t, you’re probably writing a collection of short stories, or else you have a plot problem.)

Changing the prince to the penniless son of a duke will mean that those palace scenes have to go, because your character is out on the streets with empty pockets and his finery all tattered from his unfortunate circumstances. But you need him to speak to the queen about the epidemic spreading across the neighboring kingdom to the west. How can he do that if he’s no longer a castle resident? Well, perhaps he can summon all his noble gusto to bluster his way into getting an audience with her. Or maybe he can bump into her at the midsummer festival she officiates every year. Another possibility is making the queen a charitable soul who personally feeds the homeless, and she can meet your disinherited noble boy at a shelter.

Big changes take brainstorming to make them work, and the impact they’ll have on the rest of your story needs to be considered before taking the plunge. But never fear! If it doesn’t work out like you planned, you do have the old version to fall back on.

Take a break.

Staring at the same story for months on end means you’re probably sick of it. You’ve been over the same plot so many times that all the twists are predictable. You’ve memorized every line of dialogue until they sound cheesy to your own mind. Every change you make doesn’t seem to make this book any less disgusting, and you despair of ever turning it into something halfway readable.

Stop. Step away for a while. A week may be enough time to refresh your mind and forget the flaws you’ve been zeroed in on for ages, or you may need a month or more. However long it needs to be, take a break. Read for fun. Write something small just because you can, no matter how imperfect it is. Refill your well of creativity.

For me, writing for the contests Rooglewood Press put on the past few years has saved my sanity as far as the Journeys of the Chosen series goes. Taking a few months to write and revise something relatively short and altogether new revitalized me. When I returned to The Prophet’s Quest or The Prophet’s Key, I was raring to go. I fell in love with those stories all over again, and resumed editing/writing with excitement.

Remember art is fluid.

Maybe you’re doing all those things, and you’re still scared to tweak and fiddle and entirely revamp things. I get it. I’ve been there. But your story might have to get worse before it can get better. And the only way to get to that place called Better is to start editing. And then keep editing. And edit some more. Your story will transform along the way, and you will too. You’ll grow as a writer. Even if you have a huge mess on your hands, you’re learning something!

Something I’ve realized after grueling rounds of editing is that the more you do it, the more fearless you get. I used to moan and groan and clench my teeth to even think of changing my books. (I still do, but those episodes tend to be more short-lived these days.) But as I slowly develop my sense of story, plot, and character, I begin to see the trouble spots more easily. Then I begin to dive in and fix them with less hesitation. The old adage is true: practice does make perfect. Or at least a whole lot better.

What are your top editing woes? What do you do when you’re worried about making things worse by changing them? How do you stay motivated to keep editing when you can no longer stand the sight of your manuscript?

Keep Reading

Four Elements of a Successful Villain – guest post by Josiah Dyck

Tracey Dyck 38 Comments

Today is a special day, my friends! First, I am at my friend’s wedding right now (so this post is scheduled to go up on its own).

Second, I’m featured on Stori Tori’s Blog, in a post called So Your Character is From Canada, in which the other contributors and I discuss our country. Do check it out! I know the previous instalment, So Your Character is From Australia, was super informative and entertaining.

And third, my brother Josiah has kindly produced a guest post of his own for me to share with you! As a fellow writer, he and I are often the first ones to hear each other’s story ideas, talk out the plot knots, and flail excitedly over the latest fictional development in our WIPs. And today, Josiah invites you into a discussion about villains. I’ll bow out now and let him take the stage . . .

~*~



Let’s talk about villains.

Authors tend to focus more of their
creativity on the hero. That’s all well and good, but villains are vital too.
We shouldn’t simply brush them aside, or create them with a half-hearted
effort. Without opposition, your protagonist will never grow; without creative
opposition, your readers will become bored whenever the villain shows up.
Let me offer you an analogy showing the
importance of successful antagonists. Seeing as my sister’s blog readership consists
largely of females (if the commenters are any indication), I have tailored this
analogy to that gender.
Suppose you are looking to date a guy, and
you have only two options. One guy is the very epitome of a stereotypical young
male: he lounges around at home playing video games while eating Doritos, he
acts like an animal around his friends, and he tries to be suave around girls.
The other guy is the polar opposite: he’s got personality, interesting hobbies,
and maybe even a measure of class. He can be a gentleman around peers both male
and female. He doesn’t put on an act because he can just be himself. Which guy
are you going to like enough to date? (If you answered “The first one,” we need
to talk later.)
It’s the same way with villains. You must
successfully craft your villains so that your readers like them in some form or
another. Their opinion of a story may not be as high if you offer an antagonist
who lacks creativity.
“But what makes a villain successful?”
you may ask. That is a very astute question, one which I will try my best to
answer. In order to do so, we must discuss elements that enhance a villain.
This is not a comprehensive list, but rather a few things I’ve noticed that
strengthen a villain. I shall offer examples from various forms of media.
1. They’re human.


Close your eyes for a moment and reflect
on some of your favorite antagonists. Why is it that you like them? Think about
it long enough, and you just might discover that one reason why they’re your
favorite is because they are human.
I’m not talking about being a Homo
sapiens. I’m talking about a villain who is capable of being a real person, who
can show emotion, who is not above flawed human nature. It’s a powerful thing.
Your readers will connect with him that much more if he is deeper than those
villains who think they can rise above the rest of humanity. That kind of
antagonist can work, and I’ve certainly written villains like that. But we can
relate to the guy who feels the sting of betrayal as much as any one of us, or
that girl who has a soft spot for someone and will do anything for that person.
An example of a human villain is Loki
(cue the fangirling). He may like to think of himself as higher than mere
humans, but this is not so. He obviously craves some fatherly approval, which
Odin doesn’t give, especially after the incidents in The Avengers.
Learning that he was born of the Frost Giant race distresses him and causes him
to feel betrayed for not being told this before.

However, what could very well be his
greatest human attribute is his love for his mother. I’ll never forget that one
scene in Thor: The Dark World that makes me almost cry every time I
watch it. [SPOILER ALERT] Frigga is murdered by Malekith, and the sorrow of it
all gets to me. The saddest part, though, is at the very end of the sequence,
where we can’t hear anything but music. Loki is reading when a guard comes and
says, “Your mother is dead.” Loki simply nods, and the guard leaves. Loki
stands up, and nothing happens for a moment. Then Loki uses a blast of his
telekinesis powers to knock over the furniture in his cell.

This brief scene—which lasts no more than
ten to fifteen seconds—sharply conveys Loki’s grief and rage over Frigga’s
death. [SPOILERS OVER] It’s a powerful moment that brings me close to tears and
shows that Loki is indeed human. And we feel for him because we have also
experienced sorrow over the death of someone in our lives. It goes to show that
human villains are some of the best kind.

2. They have
conflicting values.


I’ve noticed some successful villains
have values that go against one another. This technique—which works for protagonists
just as well—is effective. It adds an element of unpredictability to your
antagonist. I first learned about this in the book Writing Fiction for Dummies. If you haven’t read it yet, I strongly encourage you to amend the
situation. It’s quite helpful, with tips on everything from worldbuilding to
writing queries.
But I’m getting off-topic. Every
character has a value, or, at least, they should. A value is something that is
most important to the character. Say you have a villainess with a value that says,
“Revenge is most important to me.” This makes her more interesting than if she
didn’t have any values, but she’s still a flat character.
That’s why it’s important to have two or
more values. If they oppose each other, your readers will become drawn to your
villain, because she’s now become a round character. Suppose she has a husband
who’s dying of cancer. Now she has a second value: “Curing my husband is most
important to me.” What’s the result? Hooked readers and flying sparks as the
values collide.

You may have heard of the classic
villain Darth Vader. Black-armored and caped Sith Lord? Has a bit of an asthma
problem and fights using a glowing red light on a stick? Well, anyway, this dude
has some conflicting values, which the abovementioned book briefly touches on.
They are “Power is most important to me” and “My son is most important to me.”
These are obviously going to collide, and when they do, it’s going to be big.
As it happens, they create some conflict
on more than one occasion. And each time they do, we wonder which one will win
out in the end. Vader, at the climax of episode 6, chooses his son over
power—and it costs him his life. But it certainly creates a villain of
intrigue.
3. They are unique.
Suppose we have an antagonist who’s
really cliché. This villain plots and plans and schemes, but he can’t for the
life of him come up with a splendidly evil idea. But not to despair! He has the
ol’ fallback for all good villains: take over the world . . . just because!
Right. That makes him so interesting.
Look, nothing’s bad, per se, with the
“taking over the world” plot. It’s just that it’s so overused. Your antagonist
needs to be unique. (And if he is going to rule the world, he needs to have a
strong motivation for doing so. But that’s a whole other topic.)
Too often, we as writers don’t infuse our
villains with uniqueness. But it’s such an important thing to do. If you’re
wondering what you could do to help make your bad guy stand out, it’s actually
easier than it sounds. Think about some of your friends. What makes them
unique? You may just get ideas for your own villains. He may dress a certain
way. She might have a peculiar mannerism. Maybe he’s superstitious and tries to
be careful about where he walks. She could be extremely paranoid about anything
and everything. The options are virtually limitless.



“I HAVE CHORTLES!”
There’s a villain whom I’m sure you’ve
never heard of, and I don’t mean that sarcastically this time. He is a Beanish
named Fawful, from the Mario & Luigi video game series. What makes this
little guy one of my favorite video game villains of all time is his use of
Engrish and his amusing food metaphors. For those of you who aren’t sure what
Engrish is, it’s “a slang term for the misuse or corruption of the English
language by native speakers of some East Asian languages,” according to Wikipedia.
An example of Fawful’s speech is, “In the
last moments of the finale of the finale, when relief leads to negligence that
begets rashness . . . That is when the comeback that faltered comes back and
beats your pathetic comeback that I scoff at!” And here’s a food metaphor of
his: “Now a Midbus battle will unfold like an angry dip of many layers on the
chips of wildest hopes!” It’s crazy, but it makes Fawful unique, not to mention
humorous.
4. There are many
types of villains.
This probably comes as no surprise to
you, and it goes hand-in-hand with the above element. Trying out various types
of villains can help keep your antagonists unique. For example, there’s the
sympathetic villain, who often has a tragic backstory that can shape him in
various ways. The misunderstood villain is one who may have noble intentions,
but others see his actions as evil. Some villains are loved by us because of a
redeeming characteristic of theirs, but we hate them at the same time because
they’re devious and wicked.

What about the villain who is purely evil
and enjoys inflicting pain on others? One might compare them to the Joker as he
was described in The Dark Knight. Alfred tells Bruce Wayne, “Some men just want
to watch the world burn.” Then there’s the antagonist who is controlled by a
higher being; whether or not she’s actually evil is up to you. Someone could
even use an anti-hero as the main opposition: they’re not really bad, but they
still don’t have heroic qualities, and could end up hindering the hero. The
list goes on and on.
Another one of my favorite video game
villains is one from Super Paper Mario, who goes by the name Count Bleck (“Bleh
heh heh! Bleck!”). At first, he just seems like an antagonist who wants to
destroy all known worlds. However, he is actually a sympathetic villain, named
Lord Blumiere, who has lost the girl he loved. Distraught and convinced she is
gone forever, he becomes embittered at the world. Without his love, his life
has no meaning. He pilfers a magical book, known as the Dark Prognosticus, to
destroy his dimension and sets his gaze on terminating all others. But little
does he know that the book’s power has magically influenced him. I won’t spoil
the ending of the game, in case you decide to play it, but it has a bittersweet
finale that you wouldn’t expect from a Mario game.
[source]

For the Rooglewood contests, I’ve
determined that not only do I want to use a different genre for each entry, but
I also want to use different types of villains to keep them unique. For Five
Enchanted Roses, I had a villain who went by the alias “the Master,” and
whose real name I won’t disclose. Karnu was the name of the antagonist for Five
Magic Spindles.

My friend Christine contrasted the two
quite well: “[The Master] was fascinating in the fact that he was off his
rocker. Like we’ve said before, those kinds of villains are super interesting
and fun. He was manipulative and coy, which kept me guessing. But I like how
Karnu is so confident and powerful. While [the Master] did things in secret and
more delicately, Karnu just bursts in the room all, ‘BOW TO ME.’ He just oozes
with power and it makes me nervous for our heroes. I like when books make me
nervous. It keeps me on the edge of my seat. So, all that to say, I like them
each differently. I liked [the Master’s] quiet manipulation, and Karnu’s
powerful cunning.”
Is one villain better than the other? No,
because they’re both different and unique in their own ways. That’s why it’s so
important to try out different types of villains. They might be human, they
should have conflicting values, and they also should be unique. There are other
elements that make a villain successful, and, like I said, this isn’t a
comprehensive list. But if you apply these to your antagonist, readers will
definitely be more interested in your character and will consider the villain
to be a successful one.
If you have any questions, feel free to
ask them in the comments below. I’d be happy to answer them as best I can. May
the writing force be with you!
Josiah is an avid writer and enjoys
crafting stories for the enjoyment of others. He placed second in a Christmas
story held by a local newspaper. He was also one of ten nominees (writing as Feral_Mutant) in the “Write Like a Ninja” flash fiction contest for LEGO/Scholastic. He thoroughly enjoys
soundtrack music and owns twenty-odd albums. For most of his recent works, he
has created playlists to go with them, and is working on one for Christine
Smith’s Burning Thorns novel. He believes pizza should be its own food
group.
 
~*~
 
Tracey here again! Wow, this makes me want to go brush up own villains . . . polish them until they gleam with a malevolent glow. Point #4 gives me ideas for all sorts of new baddies, too! And–I may be somewhat biased here–but I have to say that the Master and Karnu are both superb examples of well-crafted villains. Thanks so much for a wonderful post, Josiah!
Keep Reading

Write Anyway

Tracey Dyck 24 Comments

As I sit in my PJ’s and begin drafting this post between breakfast and a writing project and work, I feel the swirl of words sliding through my veins, begging to spill out. (Or maybe it’s the coffee I had this morning providing me with a boost of energy. Either way.) The writing mood has hit me again. If I had my druthers today, I would not open the front door. I would stay parked in my chair, fingers on the keyboard, and I would wing my way to another world.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time. In less than two hours, I’ll head to work. Before then, I need to shower, pack a meal, and maybe work on a little nonfiction project because I have a deadline. The writing mood may linger, but with no outlet, it will settle in the back of my mind and wait for inspiration to stir it up again.

When I come home at 8 pm, my brain will likely be too tired to string together pretty sentences. And so I hold out hope for tomorrow, during which I may have a few spare hours in which to write.

But there is no guarantee that I’ll be in the mood.

During high school, I found ways to write even when the week was full of schoolwork and youth group and chores and other things. I thought I was busy then, but I made the effort to write anyways. I loved it too much to not write.

I feel even busier now. Twenty- to thirty-hour weeks, blogging, social outings, family time, and all the random bits of life . . . Writing happens less often now. I’m coming to accept that, but it does mean that if I want to write at all, I have to utilize my spare time–whether or not I feel like it.

I don’t know how you feel about writing, whether it’s a hobby or something you want to do for a living. If you, like me, want to make it a career, then we must treat it like a job. Not in a joy-sucking, “I’m obligated to do this” sort of way, but in a persistent way.

Your muse isn’t cooperating? Doesn’t matter. Write. Lacking inspiration? Just write. Your thoughts are too bland and listless to arrange themselves nicely on the page? Write out those bland and listless words anyway. Some days you have to give yourself permission to write junk. At least you’re writing.

“I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card . . . and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.” -Joyce Carol Oates

Of course you need breaks. I’m not saying go burn yourself out. You may need that evening off to watch your favorite show, or that week to just read and sketch and wander through the trees and refill your well of inspiration. Please put the writing aside when necessary.

But a lot of the time, when you feel like doing anything but staring at a blank page, that’s exactly what you need to do. The act of putting pen to paper or fingers to keys may be just the thing to wake up the ideas. Muses are flighty creatures. Yours may be off sulking in a corner right now, but if you start writing, it might get curious and slink up to your shoulder again. Then again, it might not. But if you write long enough, whether it be minutes or hours or days or weeks, the inspiration will come back. By writing consistently, you’re forming a habit. The mood might start arriving more consistently then, too.

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” -Louis L’Amour

For me, I’m realizing that ‘consistent’ does not–cannot–mean something like, “On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I will write for three hours,” or “I will write a minimum of 100 words a day.” I wish it did. But the way life is right now, very few activities land on the exact same day at the exact time, every time. My schedule morphs on a daily basis. So although it’s harder to hold myself accountable under these circumstances, I have to take stock every day and determine if/when I have time to write. And then I aim to do it. Sometimes other tasks take longer, or I discover upon reaching my writing time that I truly don’t have anything to put on the page. And sometimes I read blogs and check email when I should be writing. I’m human. Discipline is something I’m learning.

The important thing is to show up.

And show up again.

And show up again.

Write. Write glorious pages upon pages of flowing script, or write one measly paragraph that clunks onto the page like an unwieldy cement block. Write passionate, inspired scenes, or write the most boring chapter you’ve ever penned. Whatever it looks like today, write anyway!

(Editing, after all, fixes everything. But that’s another post altogether.)

Keep Reading

Unraveling a Mess of Threads

Tracey Dyck 15 Comments
Alternate Title: How I Survived the Editing Axe
As many of you may know, my writing time over the past couple months has been all-consumed by editing The Brightest Thread, my Five Magic Spindles entry. (You can learn more about the contest HERE. I’ve also posted snippets, as well as featured my heroine and villainess for Beautiful People.)
 
 
But I’ve yet to regale you with how the actual process went, aside from brief mentions here and there.

 
First things first: I finished!!!!! At long last, fueled by sheer grit and determination and Two Steps From Hell music (pardon the name), I cut my entry down to exactly 20,000 words. Excuse me while I collapse in relief. Actually no, I can’t collapse. I have a post to share with you. Ahem.

 
I could go into all kinds of detail about how I finally came up with the idea for the story, how I read the Grimm and Perault originals, how I considered various genres before circling back to fantasy . . . But that would take too long. And if there’s one thing this contest has taught me, it’s conciseness.

 
So we’ll skip the beginning stages of my writing process, and simply say that I decided to pants this thing (as in, write by the seat of my pants, with little to no plan), which is not my usual method. What an adventure! Half the time I hadn’t a clue where things were going, and the other half of the time, I had only the most basic directions to follow.
Maybe that’s why the first draft ended up at 29,934 words. A huge problem, considering that the contest rules state 20k is the limit.
I should’ve seen it coming. My first chapter was 3k. THREE THOUSAND WORDS. Practically a seventh of the story! By the time Prince Hadrian entered the scene, I was halfway to the word limit. By the time he was anywhere close to rescuing Luci, my goodness, I had long since waved goodbye to 20k.
About two months after starting, I finished the first draft in a rush of glory and panic, ecstatic over the story I’d just unspooled . . . and freaking out over the task before me. How in the world could I amputate a third of the story? How would the tale survive? How would I survive?
I let my obese novella sit for a week and half, during which time I bemoaned my existence and wished I could pluck Aleida’s wand from the pages and use it to increase the word limit. Even 25k would be a relief!
But alas, it was not to be. And my complaining, which I’m sorry to say continued into the editing process, did nothing to help. Heh. Let that be a lesson to all of you!
 

Anyway, on September 8th, I sat down at my desk, opened the document, steeled myself, and commenced editing.
Now, here is another lesson. Do not try editing anything before reading over it first. Yes, you just wrote the thing. Yes, those words came from your brain. But you do not know them that well. You have been busy planting trees, but before you can prune them you must step back and see the forest, the big picture. I know this. A read-over has always been my first pre-editing step. Until The Brightest Thread. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why I even dreamed of skipping this step. Things may have gone more smoothly if I hadn’t.
So as I said, I jumped right into editing with high ambitions. I hefted my sharpened axe and attacked chapter 1.
And snipped off a teensy tiny few hundred words. “Well,” I said to myself. “That’s because this first chapter includes so much important setup. Surely the following chapters carry more fluff I can cull.”
Ha. Wrong.
In the name of conciseness again, I shall sum up that first miserable editing pass like this: my efforts only managed to get rid of about 3k words. Oh joy, oh bliss.
I then decided to lay down that ineffective axe and read over my existing material, something I should have done in the first place. Getting a bird’s-eye view of the story was helpful, but my next pass was still hard. I worked on it in a nonlinear fashion, combing over and over and over certain parts that I absolutely knew had the potential to shrink. I skipped from one spot to the other, targeting the easiest areas first and working my way to the grit-my-teeth-and-sacrifice-the-gorgeous-words areas. And when I thought I’d trimmed off all I could, I went back and shaved off more.
My techniques? Why, I’m so glad you asked! See, I’m not just rambling on about myself here. I really do want to offer you some nuggets of wisdom so that you have some tools next time your work falls under the knife.
  • Streamline. Streamline everything. Get that conversation right to the point. Put the characters where they need to be so that you don’t spend paragraphs moving them there. Every single scene must carry its weight.
  • Speaking of conversations (ha, see what I did there? No? Just me? Okay, never mind) . . . Ahem. Speaking of conversations, take a giant machete to your dialogue. Brevity is the soul of wit. Your dialogue might sparkle. It might amuse. It might snap with fiery spirit. But if it’s not serving to move the story along, it’s baggage. You can also use less speaker tags in favor of better action beats if that helps.
  • Attack the descriptions. You’d be surprised how many blanks a reader will fill in his or her imagination. Instead of spending a long paragraph describing the weather or a room or a person, pick one description that will pack a punch. Choose the most vivid, or the most necessary. All else must go.
  • Make a list of your scenes if you haven’t already. Having every piece of the story laid out made it much easier to see what was on the table, like having a map on which to mark out a battle plan. I even went so far as to write down the purpose of each scene. This helped me center each one around it’s reason for existence, thus trimming extra fluff.
  • Minor characters. Which ones are actually necessary? I needed that guard because he provided an important revelation for Luci, my heroine. But I didn’t need that oblivious elderly maid. She no longer exists. Poor Meris. Or another example: I needed at least one minor character to illustrate an important change in Luci’s circumstances, but the scene held two or three. I shortened the laughs (it was an amusing scene, and one of my favorites) by keeping it down to one minor character. You can also combine characters if possible. I did this once.
  • Subplots. Again, what can you afford to cut? Yes, they may be delicious twists, but if you can simplify or get rid of them, it goes a long way. I sacrificed at least one subplot concerning the villainess.
  • Enter your scene late and leave it early. Does the scene take half a page to get to the meat, the really interesting part? Start right there. Forget the intro. And make sure you end off sooner rather than later, at a place that will make the reader want to keep going. This piece of advice was huge for me!
  • Look for unnecessary words and banish them to the abyss. There’s nothing wrong with adverbs, but when every word counts, a punchier verb is often the better choice. “Whispered” is shorter than “said softly.” “Trembling” is shorter than “nervously twitching.” I Googled lists of unnecessary words and searched my manuscript for them. I was able to sluice off hundreds in one afternoon. Some examples of unneeded words or phrases are: could, start/started to, began/began to, that, then, somewhat, somehow, really, completely, very, say, all, just.

Some of this I simply realized myself. The point about starting late and leaving early I picked up from an article on Go Teen Writers. The entire post was helpful. And a couple more were given me by Rachel Heffington @ The Inkpen Authoress. (I discovered that her entry for Five Glass Slippers two years ago had been about as oversized as mine to begin with . . . yet she managed to trim it down, AND she won a place in the collection. Inspired by her success, I emailed her asking for advice, which she graciously offered. The advice about dialogue and description were largely from her.)

Because graphs are fun, and because graphs relating to wordcount data are even more fun, I made some!

This one displays my first draft wordcount as it went up to almost 30k.

And this one displays my cutting progress, as I shaved 10k excess down to zero. It was pretty intense at the end there. The last week or two, on every spare day or half-day off, I holed up in my room to work on cutting. Some days I put in as many hours as a full shift at work, emerging bleary eyed to update my family on progress.

I suppose that saying I went at it with an axe is inaccurate, because as hard as I tried to cut away entire scenes . . . I guess I’m too good at pacing? Most of the scenes were actually necessary. And trust me, I reassessed and reassessed many times to be sure. So I compressed like crazy. I think I vacuum-packed the story. I didn’t hack; I whittled. Oh, and I wasn’t just cutting: I edited too. Some of the corrections required adding words rather than subtracting.

Now I hope that what’s left is a pithy story, rich despite its brevity–not a sack of story bones with no meat left on them. I really hope I haven’t sucked it dry.

You can see how crazy the final sprint was: on October 26th, I started with 899 excess words remaining, and shrank it 54 excess words. Only 54! I would’ve wrapped it up right then and there, but at that point it was late, and I needed to sleep for work the next day. Oh, did that bite! I wanted so badly to be done. But I woke up early and managed to finish before heading out. Woohoo!

And now . . . Now the cutting is finished. I succeeded. I can hardly believe it. Every other step of the way was full of doubt. I even considered not entering the contest at all, for the sake of preserving my story. But I still have the old drafts, and if I don’t win this year, I’ll be more than happy to re-expand The Brightest Thread. There’s so much I didn’t get to explore, even in the chubby first draft.

For now, though, all that’s left is to read it over a few times to make sure it’s polished to the best of my ability, and then it gets sent to the judges!

But questers! My faithful blogglings! I FINISHED! Hallelujah!

And you have finished reading this lengthy post. So much for being concise, eh? Go on: share your own tips for shrinking stories. I’d love to hear them!

Keep Reading