Editing Like a Demon: How I Cut a Novel From My Novel
Hello Funny People,
Screenshot of A Sword Named Sylph's current word count
First Draft Word Count vs. Initial Edit Word Count
Threads Screenshot (Edited for Privacy)
Sorry for these extra dollops of me this month, but I wanted to talk about something I recently finished undertaking that might give fledgling novelists a glimmer of hope. Especially those reading this might have trouble with word count bloat.
From the Top
I started writing what became A Sword Named Sylph at the start of 2018. I began it, if I'm being honest, as an emotional security blanket. I've talked about this before, I'm sure, but 2018 was the year (not only when I started this blog), I shot-gunned applications to every writing workshop I knew of in the hopes of getting into one.
However, when all you know is failure, that's all you come to expect.
So, thinking I wouldn't make it into any of those workshops, I began writing the novel. My thought process was, "Yeah, they all rejected me, but I'm writing a novel, so I'm still a real writer."
At the beginning, I was highly disciplined. I wrote every day, 1000 words a day. One day I even managed 2000 words. By the end of my first month of writing, I had 40k words written.
Then I got accepted to the Gunn Center Workshop, and I set the book aside. This, I only later learned, was a mistake. When I came back to it, it took another several years of spotty, undisciplined writing before finally, riding in the back of a van heading from Orange County to San Francisco in the summer of 2021, I finished the book as we hit Fresno.
But I knew I still had a lot of work ahead of me.
The Problems I Had
The image at the top of this post is the current word count of the novel. However, it's not the word count I arrived at upon finishing the first draft.
The messy, flawed first draft of Sylph came in at 178002 words (the last two words being the end). Three years worth of effort, grief, and yes, fun, and it was done. Sort of.
The reasons why it took me so long to finish Sylph were simple.
1) I didn't know how to write a novel. I'd made two attempts at novel writing in the past (one incomplete, one complete, but well below word count), but I hadn't tried writing one for nearly seven years before this. So, it was essentially a trial by fire. I didn't understand word count breakdowns, pacing, or anything. I learned as I went along.
2) I didn't have my writing routine in place. The routine I developed during the waning days of the pandemic, just around the time public facilities were reopening, has led to a massive upswing in my output and the quality of my work. I didn't have that during most of the writing of Sylph. I composed it in fits and starts, going through periods where I was very disciplined, producing 1000 words a sitting, and periods where I was lucky if I got 100 words down.
3) I didn't understand my process. I don't use word counts anymore, and I seldom write every day (typically), because I find neither conducive to productivity. I mark my writing by time instead. But I didn't realize this then. I thought word counts and writing every day were requirements for me to consider myself a "real writer." Now, I know better.
Revisions: Round One
For much of late 2021 and almost all of 2022, I outlined what my problems had been with this book, which boiled down to three things:
1) I'd limited myself to one viewpoint, and realized I needed to make it an ensemble piece.
2) I had to try and cut the word count down to something less daunting for a non-Epic High Fantasy while restructuring the book and keeping the story I wanted to tell intact.
3) I had to refine the prose into something less clunky and more natural
So, for that over-a-year-stretch, I did just that. I rewrote some scenes so they were in a new viewpoint. And others I wrote from scratch to bring in new viewpoints. All the while, I was also aiming to refine the writing and shorten the word count.
By the time I did, the full second draft landed at 172,000 words. So, I'd cut 6k. That was a start.
Revisions: Round Two
172,000 was still too long.
So, I started cutting chapters, scenes, and viewpoints. The macro-edits, as I've heard some call these, we're a big help. After that, I started cutting specific filler and filter words, words that either add nothing to a sentence or that increase the "psychic distance" between the reader and the viewpoint character. Some of these words included felt, thought, knew, saw, smelt, heard, realized, recognized, wondered, recalled, considered, and remembered. Whole all these words are perfectly valid verbs, they also add something of an extra wall between the reader and the character, two things you want as thin a membrane between as possible I'm prose fiction.
(Words like just, that, really, still, and actually are classic filler words that do nothing but bloat word counts. They're the gluten of prose. If you find them in your work—except in dialogue, where they lend realism—consider cutting them.)
These edits took me until January of 2023 to complete, and by the end, the word count stood at 129,600. Closer to optimal querying length, but still a little scary to an agent nonetheless.
Revisions: Round Three
It wasn't until I stumbled across the post pictured below on Threads (Fuckerberg's answer to the ongoing Ex-Bird App crisis), that I decided more recently to do another round of edits on Sylph.
Reading that post gave me a horrifying revelation: I'd done this too. Specifically with the first two chapters of Sylph. Moreso, I also realized that I hadn't given the reader a solid enough promise of what would come later in the book.
So there was only one thing for it: I had to rewrite the beginning.
First: I cut the first two chapters
Second: I wrote a prologue scene that served to set up things that would come later in the story, after part one.
Third: I re-purposed the first two scenes from chapter one into the prologue to set up the eventual dynamic of my two main characters.
Fourth, and finally: I undertook another line edit all the way through the book. This time, not only did I cut things I'd left in, mostly "micro gestures," in dialogue scenes and "[blank] of the [blank]" possessive constructions, but I rewrote passages to more succinctly and simply convey what I intended.
By the time I reached the end again, I'd trimmed the book down by a full 9600 more words. After three major rounds of edits, I'd cut 58000 words—effectively a whole NaNoWriMo-sized novel—from my novel.
Parting Thoughts
Doing that last edit made me fall back in love with A Sword Named Sylph. When I'd finished it initially, I was glad to finally have it out of my system, as if I'd finally passed a nagging kidney stone. Now, I see how fun this book is again, and it's only made me more determined to try and get it into print. Whether I will or not is out of my control, of course, but like most writers, I'm persistent and unafraid of a little challenge.
Watch out agents. Here I come.
— IMC 🙃
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