Experts say that, over time and with practice, one unconsciously learns to write to length. It didn’t happen to me. I’m either word-count learning disabled, or I haven’t done enough of the right kind of writing. I never wrote for a newspaper or for magazines. My technical writing was nuts and bolts, cut-and-dried stuff, with no opportunity to be wordy. I learned a lot about deadlines, organization, and proofreading doing that, but not about writing a creative project to length. Cutting to length after the fact is time consuming.

One solution I plan to employ in the future is to write more poetry. I love it, and I can’t think of a better training process to conquer my wordiness. Poetry requires sparseness, the selection of the best word to express a thought. I plan to write more short fiction and essays, too.

In the meantime, on this project, I outlined between drafts, to help ensure the story was staying on track. I’m also employing a method that my quasi-personal-editor (husband) came up with while we got Shadows Fall ready to self publish. We call it Pages to Paragraphs. It doesn’t prevent bulk, but it helps reduce my writing to something manageable after the fact.

The original Pages to Paragraphs took its name from reducing chunks of prose that were pages in length to a paragraph or two, in other words summarizing parts of the story. There’s a difference between telling and showing in fiction, and showing takes a lot more words. I decided what needed to be shown and what told, then used Pages to Paragraphs to shorten the telling parts further. I’m not entirely happy with Shadows Fall, even now, and it could still be shorter. But it was an important step in my learning process, and Pages to Paragraphs played a role in completing that step.

My writing has changed, matured. Pages to Paragraphs has evolved as well, flexing to fit the piece of writing or what needs to be cut. I’m using it to shorten my current novel. The problem right now is inflated sentences running amok with repetition, passive usage, and convolutions that make me wonder where my brain was at the time I wrote them, or if I’ve somehow forgotten how to write.

The Process:

1. Determine the percent to cut by comparing current word count to the required length.

2. Analyze the work to determine where to cut. From the narrative, the descriptions, or dialog that’s too cute to live? Is the excess padding mostly in the beginning, middle, or end? Are some chapters more obese than others? In my current book, it’s all over the place, in the sentences, which at least makes the math easy.

3. Break the manuscript into non-overwhelming portions (I divide it neatly into chapters), and crunch each one down the required percentage.

4. Read each trimmed section through to ensure I haven’t butchered anything beyond comprehension. Smooth as necessary, without adding words.

Seems obvious, doesn’t it? There’s more.

The Rules:

1. Never allow myself to say this is impossible, that I can’t cut any more.

2. Remember this isn’t the time for creative writing, only creative cutting. Turn off the pink battery bunny — remove its batteries and hide them. Bring out a GI Joe with an assault weapon intended only to kill words. Picture the tough action figure from Toy Soldiers, or Legolas taking out Orcs and Oliphants in LOTR. Some might prefer Edward Scissorhands cutting topiaries.

3. Remember this is a sculpting process, the equivalent of chipping away wood, rock, ice, or whatever medium a sculptor works with, to reveal the image inside. I need to be brutal and thorough, but exercise judgement and finesse.

4. Avoid deluding myself. Inevitably, when I start work on a chapter or scene, I read a little and think, “Oh, this one doesn’t need any work, it’s fine as it is.” But if I tell myself, “Cut or else, and cut the full amount!” and I begin to examine each sentence on its own, I soon find myself chipping away. I see redundancies I didn’t before. I find tangential thoughts that are meaningless to the story, little descriptive lists of adjectives. I notice sentences strung together in a kind of drunken meandering rather than in straightforward ways. I find passive verbs, passive phrases.

5. Pat myself on the back, after cutting each section of my darling to pieces. Give myself a cheer as I notice the word count gradually melting, and take a break for a few minutes. Then charge into the next piece and keep cutting.

One note of caution: I’ve used this method in the past and found that there were one or two tidbits I wished later I hadn’t cut. Even months later, I reread and still missed them. It’s safer, and I can be more disciplined in this process, if I back up each draft as I go. I even save “Trash” files containing the larger chunks I’ve cut. That way I’ll send off a lean, clean draft to agents and keep my soggy, romantic, full-bodied drafts in a drawer to cry over later if I want. Nobody else may love them, but I still can. (I really am that sappy — pitiful, isn’t it?)

The strength of this method applies to any overwhelming task I’ve taken on, from piles of film after a holiday, when I worked in a photo-processing plant, to book-length revisions or new projects from scratch as a technical writer. It has to do with breaking a big task into manageable portions, and engaging self-discipline and common sense — with the addition of silencing the sentimental voice that wants me to think creative work should only be fun and easy, and God-forbid, never destructive.

In other words, it’s all in my head. But if that’s what it takes, giving myself a different view of the problem and breaking it into smaller pieces, then . . . whatever works, right?

This is my final major edit of this book, its sixth draft. After that it will get a proofreading pass. Then it’s off to seek an agent.

I’m in the second category. I’m a wordy writer, and it frustrates me to see how many extra words I write. If I’d been able to keep my words in check, the story surely wouldn’t have taken so long to come together. Or would it? Why this need to expand so much on what can be said with so many less words?

Authors who write about writing sometimes tell us a writer trains himself eventually how to write to word count. I’ve found I can do this with non-fiction, but fiction is another creature altogether. It’s all in the editing phase for me, or should I say the cutting phase. That’s where I am now, at the end of the third draft, embarking on the endless cutting phase.

It’s a matter of getting to the right words, the way a sculptor chips away at stone or wood to get to the form inside. Some people do more of the chipping away of words in their heads, in advance. I spill mine onto the page. I write and write and find when I’m done that there’s some good stuff there hidden among lots of other stuff that I have to sort through, sweep away, and haul off to the word dump in truckloads.

I wonder about the similarity of the words “mind” and “mine.” Is my mind a not so rich mine, containing too much useless ore to be sifted through? Have I never really hit the mother lode in there? Is the creative vein too thin, is there too much tailing left behind to be worth all this effort?

Do you write long or short? Do you trim away or build up content in your edits?