Slashing Your Written Words

 Saturday, I attended a zoom meeting that featured a woman who teaches English and Literature at Emporia State University in Emporia, KS. Her presentation was on Flash Fiction. The final part was an exercise to write this type of story with guidelines given by her, part by part. It was an interesting and enjoyable exercise. 

Of course, once finished, what we had was a very rough first draft. I liked mine well enough to continue working on it later.

What is one of the first things that must be done? Deleting, or cutting, words. When we write a first draft in a hurry, somehow all rules of writing fly away, and we commit beginner errors. What words will I need to cut?

• Unnecessary words--those that add nothing to the story or the sentence
• Repeated words--easy to do when writing that first draft
• Repeated ideas--sometimes we find ourselves repeating in different paragraphs an idea we are trying to get across. We want our reader to 'get it' so we tend to repeat to make sure. It is not necessary to do this. We must give our readers some credit. 
• Cut adjectives that are not needed--too many clutter the piece, one is fine, more than that not
• Cut adverbs--show by action rather than adding an adverb to modify your verbs
• Remove excess 'the' and 'that'--rewrite sentences without them and they can still stand alone
• Trim wordy phrases--be concise
• Active voice usually uses fewer words than passive
• Eliminate conjunctions--write two sentences instead of one long one joined with a conjunction
• Get to the point--stop overexplaining
• Pare your descriptions--use fewer words but good ones

Many of us write to submit with a definite word count. 1000 words? If the guidelines give that number, you had better stick to it. Go over, and all your hard work will swirl down the drain. It would behoove to learn how to cut words.

When you have to shorten your first draft, look at it as a challenge. You might be surprised how easy it is to cut 200 words, or even 50, from what you wrote on the first try. I have always found that cutting words helps me finish with a stronger piece. 

I'm looking forward to working on the draft I wrote over the weekend. There may be additions, but I know there will certainly subtractions.