If you’re anything like me, few words strike fear in your heart quite like “word limit.” (Okay. There are MANY things that strike more fear into my heart than those two word,s but I digress.) Words are like Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups: the more, the better! Why use two words when five will do? Why limit yourself to one paragraph when you could write three?!
If you write genre fiction, one of the first things you learn, one of the things that’s drilled into your head at conferences and in workshops is the average word count for your genre. And if you’re like me, your knee-jerk reaction is to say You can’t tell me what to do! and then huff off. That’s definitely how I reacted (silently, of course, and I didn’t huff off) at a writing conference I attended last year, when one of the panelists said romance novels shouldn’t run more than 80,000 words because that’s the Industry Standard, and that’s Still What Harlequin Wants, and Harlequin Is Still the Major Romance Publisher.
There’s a problem with this theory, I think: while Harlequin does publish a lot of romances, so do plenty of other publishers, including all of the Big Five, and a few smaller imprints as well, including Hallmark, Entangled and the Wild Rose Press. In other words – it’s not the Harlequin Show anymore. And over the past year, I have read my share of 80,000 word novels – but I’ve also read a LOT that were way beyond that, like Lucy Score’s Knockemout Trilogy (highly recommended, BTW!). A lot of readers are demanding them. The success of Ali Hazelwood, Emily Henry, and Lucy Score (among others) attests to that.
I’ve always been wordy. It’s just how I write. Brevity is not for me. Short stories tend to take on lives of their own and turn into full-fledged novels. Stand-alone novels suddenly become books that need a sequel – or become an entire series. My characters tend to take on lives of their own, and the subplots start to add up, and the secondary characters take on larger roles, and the main conflicts become more complicated, and before you know it, I’m neck-deep in OMG WHAT HAVE I DONE??!!
All of that said . . .
Over the past few months, I’ve taken a huge leap of faith and started to workshop one of my novels. I’ve had beta readers in the past for other works, but those were my friends; they weren’t shy about telling me what didn’t work, but they were also supportive and that helped soften the blows. But I don’t know anyone in my critique group, and each month, there are some different people. If you submit, you also have to critique; no one gets a free ride! And because of that, we’re limited to 5,000 words.
Of course, my novel is . . . somewhat more than 80,000 words.
To be precise, before I started this workshop journey, it was 116,772 words.
I’ve been working on this novel and its rewrites for some time. But generally, like – I think – most of us, I print out the entire manuscript, then go over with my pink or purple pen. And after a few times of that, you kind of stop seeing the minutiae. You see some places where you think yeah, I’m not totally happy with that, but you move past it because, you know, you’ll fix it later. Whenever “later” is.
But to submit only 5,000 words per month – I don’t want to end things in the middle of a chapter, obviously, because that’s not fair to the readers, and it offends my sensibilities. So what I’ve had to do is spend time really focusing on those two or three chapters. Line by line. Word by word. Making myself drill down to the essence of what this chapter is about. Making myself really consider what’s important. Forcing myself to consider if there is another, more concise and more precise, way to say something.
When you’re writing for someone else, you can’t do just anything you want. At least, I can’t. It needs to be as perfect as it can be. So not only am I editing for grammar, punctuation, etc., but I’m also looking critically at each sentence. Each paragraph. Do I have redundancies? Is there a word or phrase I use too much? (Hint: YES.) Do all actions follow each other logically? Can I murder any darlings?
And what I’ve seen, over the past few months, is a manuscript that has lost a little weight. Not a lot – but some. It’s getting toned and tightened. On the average, I’ve cut about 800 words for each submission – so over three months, that’s about 2,400 words cut from the novel.
Of course, for me, this isn’t just about cutting words. This is about having the space to focus on just these two or three chapters. When I can do that, I can really focus on how each sentence works, how each paragraph works. In one submission, I finally had to admit that one scene just did not work, and never had worked. It was wonky and clunky – it was the AMC Pacer of my novel, in fact – so I ended up rewriting it in a way that not only added more tension, but moved the story forward more quickly. Would I have done this if I hadn’t been trying to submit all these chapters at once? Doubtful. Did almost the entire scene end up on the cutting-room floor? Yes. Am I happy about that? Also yes.
Now, is this scene one that I could have let my critique group read and comment on? Sure – but that thought literally didn’t occur to me until I was committed to figuring it out on my own. I know a lot of people are okay with submitting less-than-perfect work to critique groups – in fact, they want to in order to get the feedback! – but perfectionist that I am, I can’t do that!
My inspiration on this journey (besides the word limit) was the book Refuse to be Done by Matt Bell. This is a short, streamlined little writing book that says you can write a book in three drafts. (I can’t, but maybe some people can.) If you’re looking to be at the level of rewrites I’m at, though, the third section of this book offers the most valuable insights, including his method for cutting words by looking at “orphans” – those one or two lines on a page by themselves, or those one or two words on a line by themselves at the end of a paragraph. His suggestion is to become committed to eliminating all of those orphans. And that may take not just cutting, but rewriting to make everything tighter. This is the advice I’ve gone back to again and again as I try to get these submissions down to their word limit.
I also go back to that immortal advice: Murder Your Darlings. Even if it, as Stephen King says, breaks my scribbler’s heart, I have become much more adept at figuring out the darlings to murder.
Another trick is one that actually just goes back to good writing: action. I have gotten pretty bad about trying to get into my characters’ heads and telling things from their point of view, and that’s great, but at the end of the day, it takes more words to say, “I felt his fingers brush my arm,” than it does to say, “His fingers brushed my arm.” Of course, if the character’s eyes are closed, one is totally correct to say. Still. BOTH are correct, regardless.
I had to really focus on this these past two weeks, as I tried to ready chapters for submission to a writing contest. This time, instead of a word count, we got 24 pages, plus a 1-page synopsis. (The synopses are a story for another day.) But it still made me think critically about each word and sentence and paragraph in those 25 pages. Especially for one submission, where I was literally rewriting a first draft to try to make it somewhat presentable.
So. If you’re trying to focus on word count, maybe these ideas can help you out. If you’re trying to just tighten up your writing, I really do recommend focusing on just a few chapters at a time. Make a game of it. Save it as a different file, just in case you don’t like it later. But my guess is that you’ll like it more than you think you will.
Here’s a link for Matt Bell’s book: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/refuse-to-be-done-matt-bell/1139771041?ean=9781641293419