Stage One complete

At last the re-edit/write is now done. I've printed out 238 pages, and parcelled it up in a blue folder I bought a decade ago and never used to take with me on my holidays.
At the time I was sending submissions out to agents and wanted to impress, but soon discovered that fancy folders were a no-no among busy agents. So at last it has a use!

 The word count is now 104,740 reduced from 147k so that is a substantial reduction. After a few days break comes the read through on paper with pen and post-its to hand. Heaven knows what I'll find to correct. Anything is possible. I may need more than post it notes, though they are a fair size. I never travel without my laptop, paper etc etc etc so that won't be a problem. 

I took out the first chapter, and one or two paragraphs that I thought repetitious or that I didn't need, but the bulk of the reduction has come from removing what I call stage directions - moving to or from one position to another -  and taking out many speech tags where the action made it clear who was speaking;  generally tightening up my writing by remoing all those unnecessary words such as just, nearly, almost. 

A word like quickly can become a habit or a crutch word and mop up 50 or 60 uses and you never notice until you work your way through a list looking for them. I found over 200 uses of one word, but I've forgotten what that word was now. Turned, probably. My characters kept turning before they spoke or acted or sometimes even breathed. I also discovered I was one of those authors who gave advance warning and then described the action! Quelle horreur! I think I dropped that bad habit some time ago.

The pic is from our trip into Yorkshire last week. Very dramatic skies and a narrow single track road, but we got there safely and without the rain storm we suffered on our trip last year.

Unnecessary words

I know most of Rachelle Gardner’s  tips for shortening a manuscript off by heart but I suppose it doesn’t hurt to refresh the memory and keep the advice on record here.

As she says, if you cut 12 words per page in a 350-page manuscript, you have shortened it by 4,200 (unnecessary) words. Another method I heard recently was to cut 2 lines per page. In a 300 page novel that’s probably around 6,000 words.

Rachelle offers a checklist to consider:

•  Adverbs, especially those with “ly” endings. Ask yourself if they’re necessary.
• Adjectives. Often people use two or three when one (or none) is better.
• Gerunds. Words that end in “ing.”
• Passive voice: Over-use of words like “was,” “were” and “that” indicate your writing may be too passive. Reconstruct in active voice.
• Redundancy in words or ideas. Don’t say something twice that the reader only needs once.
• Passages that are overly descriptive.
• Passages that describe characters’ thoughts and feelings in too much detail (i.e. long sections of narrative or interior monologue).
• Passages that tell the reader what they already know.
• Passages that use a lot of words to “tell” the reader something that should be “shown”
• Unnecessary backstory.

(http://www.booksandsuch.biz/blog/cut-thousands-of-words/)

She also offers a list of words that may not be truly effective:

about, actually, almost, like, appears, approximately, basically, close to, even, eventually, exactly, finally, just, just then, kind of, nearly, practically, really, seems, simply, somehow, somewhat, sort of, suddenly, that, truly, utterly, were.

The Search and Replace function makes this easier than it sounds, and the manuscript will be the better for it.

She also has an interesting rant about the Brave New World of Publishing on her blog 22^nd September. Read it with a wry grin! (http://www.rachellegardner.com/)