How to Cut Your Book’s Word Count – Wider Picture

Sometimes, it’s all too easy to go over your target word count for a novel! Maybe the ending took longer than you thought, maybe there were too many subplots, but wherever the excess words have come from, something needs to change. Obviously, there is some room for a higher word count within a certain margin, but you don’t want to stray particularly far from what you originally planned or was requested. When this does happen, you will have to be able to make cuts to keep your book on track and within the required word count. In this blog post, we will start by considering what your target word count should be, then move on to how you can achieve this.

When you start writing a book, you will want to have a target word count in mind so that you have an idea of what you are aiming for and will know if you are on track. If a publisher has signed you on for a book you haven’t written yet, they will probably give a rough idea of what length they are thinking of, so it’s easy to plan around this.

However, if you are still at the stage where you are submitting your manuscript to publishers and agents or self-publishing, you will have to decide on a sensible word count. As a general rule, novels are somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 words, so aim for something around this. Some genres may have different word counts, but you will probably know if you are writing in one of these.

Description

Once you have worked out how many words you need to cut, it is time to start looking at where these can come from. One obvious place to start is in your descriptive sections. While these are vital to set the scene for your book and make sure your readers are immersed in your book’s world, you don’t want them to detract from the narrative flow of your book or needlessly inflate your word count. Read over your descriptions again and consider what could be combined to make them shorter and clearer. There may be some sections you can cut completely, especially if it is the second time a character has visited the area.

Instead of describing everything your characters come across, think about whether there are times when your characters could do the legwork for you. After all, part of the point of descriptive writing is to evoke certain feelings in your readers, such as a sense of calm, or maybe a hint of unease. Consider whether there’s anywhere you could drop the description and instead simply state how it makes your character feel. Do they find the fog unsettling? Try to see the scene through their eyes and just describe the key points and the character’s thoughts. This can actually make your reader feel more engaged in the story and avoid them having to take in long descriptions.

Scenes

A more dramatic way to slash your word count is to cut entire scenes. To work out what must stay and what could go, you need to divide your book up into sections. Work your way through the book, determining when each scene starts and ends, then calculate how vital they are to the story overall, plot progression, and character development. You can rank them by whether they are necessary for your story to make sense, whether they don’t affect the storyline at all, or whether they add important details but aren’t absolutely essential. Once you have this list, you can start deciding where to make cuts.

Scenes that are vital obviously need to stay in (although you may be able to drop some of the description using the tips above). Scenes that don’t affect the storyline can come out – if your story would read the same without them, there’s no point keeping them in. If you don’t want to say goodbye completely, why not post some on your website as bonus content? That way, you have something to encourage visitors to your website and readers that still want more have new content. Scenes that aren’t essential but do add more details can still be cut if your word count is much too high. Alternatively, you could just aim to drastically shorten them, possible by combining a few if this makes sense.

Characters

In some cases, you may be able to completely remove certain characters. The more characters you have, the more you will need a few scenes here and there to establish their backstory and the more dialogue there will be between them. If you find yourself with a lot of background characters that only show up a few times, ask yourself whether they are essential to the plot. You might be able to combine a few characters together to get rid of establishing scenes and descriptions.

Characters may also have their own subplots. By removing the character, you can take out all the scenes that only relate to this subplot. Of course, this only works if the subplot isn’t needed for the main plot to make sense, but evaluating your subplots is a great way to quickly remove a lot of words.

Wrapping Up

I hope that this helps you to get your word count to where it needs to be. If you are still having trouble meeting your target, my next blog post looks at how to cut more words on a sentence level, so come back in two weeks for that!

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