Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Writing Lab. Here’s where I try to impart some knowledge of writing I’ve managed to pick up in the twenty-five-plus years of experience I’ve had with the art in a way which might be useful to you, the reader. This is especially the case if you want to write yourself.
Over the past couple of months since I’ve started this Writing Lab, I’ve decided to do a series on the revising process. We started with a quick review of revising and how it fits into the writing process, and then I continued with a broad overview of my own revising process and its basic workings.
On Revising, Part 3 (of ?): Regarding word count and reducing it for fun and creativity
I think that I reached a new level of maturity as a writer a few years ago when I cut 1,000 words from the manuscript I was working on at the time and I was as excited about that as I was writing 1,000 new words.
For several years, I taught writing either primarily or as part of my other language arts instruction in the general education classroom. Now, I teach special education, but I do advise many of my students regarding their writing, and some of them have writing goals that I work with them on.
Some of them have been eager writers, and some of them I’ve had to figuratively drag onto the page. But one common problem many of them have had was that they considered the process of writing to be:
- Get an idea.
- Write it down.
As I explained to you at the start of this series, that is not the case. Again, I believe revision is where the true heart of writing takes place, a lesson I have tried to impart on my students and something I’ve worked to structure my instruction around. At the junior college level, for example, I always found more essay peer review and instructor review had more value for the students than any live lecture that I gave.
“Liegois, you must have always been a great revising wiz, then,” you might or might not say. Or, it might be the voices in my head. However, I would respond to this statement by saying – Reader, there were a few holes in my game1.
Specifically, the one hole that I am thinking of is that I tended to write a lot more than I needed to. A lot more.
You’ve got to remember, I was the guy who turned a relatively simple journalism thriller into a 160,000-word opus. After I wrote it, I began reading all of the writing advice articles that said to avoid anything bigger than 100,000 words unless you were Stephen King or George RR Martin or whatever. Obviously, the idea of cutting more than one-third of an existing novel horrified me.
Until, that is, I actually did it.
Reader, you will never be as hyped as you will be when you cut that 2,000 or so words from your manuscript and realize that nothing of value has been lost. Oh, my goodness, the relief you will feel from having all of those unnecessary words fall away from your work will be nothing like you’ve ever felt. It will be like the old lumbermen of the Mississippi River clearing a log jam from a bend of the river and watching the logs flow into the main channel. (I get to use the river metaphors because I live on the river, got it?)
I may have told this story before2, but I realized something about myself in my former, unfettered form, when I wrote and never had a care for how much I wrote – I wrote a lot. People tended to tell me I had an ear for dialogue when they read my stuff, which was nice – I’m a massive admirer of Elmore Leonard, so I was down with that. The only problem was, I wrote pages and pages of it. I wound up writing three pages of dialogue in a situation where one page of dialogue would have done. I realized that I should have taken in the example of Clint Eastwood when he cut out much of the dialogue from that one movie of his when he realized he didn’t need it.
The point is, when I started to look at what my characters were saying, I realized they only had to say it once (maybe twice, if they were nervous), but no more. Once I realized that, my manuscript started to shed words 1K without too much hassle.
The point is, when I started to look at what my characters were saying, I realized they only had to say it once (maybe twice, if they were nervous), but no more. Once I realized that, my manuscript started to shed words 1K without too much hassle.
The point is, when I actually started to look at what my characters were saying, I realized that they only had to say it once (maybe twice, if they were nervous), but no more than that. Once I realized that, my manuscript started to shed words 1K at a time without too much hassle. After several months, I was down to a manuscript that I could live with.
I know I am not alone in having this problem. And when I say this, I am referring specifically to one author I am a big fan of, Laurell K. Hamilton. I’m such a fan that I have, at this minute, something around a dozen paperbacks of her Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series on my bookshelves.
But she goes on and on. There’s sex scenes that could fit into one chapter rather than two, dialogue that could wrap up after a half-page rather than three pages. None of this makes me want to not read her. However, I want to try and avoid the same pitfalls in my own work. (You should be reading other people’s work for what you should avoid just as much as what you should emulate.)
When I started writing The Yank Striker, I had word count in the front of my mind the minute that I started to write the rough draft. I quickly realized, as I went through my notes on the project and started to judge what could fit into less than 100,000 words, that I had more of a series on my hands than a single work. I remembered the stories about how J. R. R. Tolkien shopped around his manuscript of Lord of The Rings around to his buds on the University of Cambridge campus and that they were horrified at the size of the manuscript. He wanted to put the entire Lord of The Rings story into a single volume, can you believe it? He finally got talked into splitting it into a trilogy.
The point is, words are important. Use them wisely. Artistic restrictions can be good for you more so than they can be bad.
On the next writing lab, I’ll discuss another aspect of revising. I’m honestly not sure how many entries there will be in this series, but there will be at least a few more.
Also, I’m going to make sure this time to post a Substack Note related to this post, asking those of you with writing and/or revising questions to share them in the responses. I’d love to hear from you and maybe help you with that one project you’ve wanted to get you across the finish line.
See you then.
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