How to Cut Your Book’s Word Count – Sentence Level

In my last blog post, we looked at how to reduce your book’s word count if you find that your early drafts are much too long. We focused on the wider picture, considering if there were some entire scenes and subplots that you could cut out, or even characters. Doing this should have already gone a long way towards getting your word count within the target that you have set yourself or that your publisher has set you. However, you may still need to trim more before you can make it to the next draft. If this is the case, it is time to move on to considering making smaller cuts, focusing on individual words and short phrases or paragraphs that you could remove and still have your book intact.

Sentence Cuts

The first thing to do is a bit of calculating. For this, you will need to know your target word count, actual word count, and how many sentences your draft has. Most word processing software will be able to do this for you. Start by working out how many words you need to lose to be at your target word count, for example, 20,000. Next, look at how many sentences you have in total. Divide the number of words you need to cut by the number of sentences to see how many words you need to lose per sentence. This often seems more manageable than trying to lose thousands of words all at once.

Remember that this figure is only an average – you might leave some sentences as they are and cut entire paragraphs elsewhere! In many cases, however, you will be able to take out the required words from each sentence, just by removing a few unnecessary linking or filler phrases. For example, words like “very”, “replied”, and “seemed” can often be removed, as well as some longer descriptive phrases. “He typed at the keyboard” can be cut to “he typed” and retain the same meaning. Similarly, a lot of short dialogue tags like “she nodded” can be cut altogether. You want your readers to know how your characters are reacting, without a description every time.

Dialogue

A good place to cut a lot of words is from dialogue, as this is a very word-heavy way of getting a plot point to your reader. Identify all the sections of dialogue you have and decide whether they actually need to be written as dialogue, or whether a brief paragraph summing up the key points would be sufficient. Of course, you may have deliberately decided to have a dialogue-heavy book if this suits your writing style. In this case, you would need to look at editing the dialogue or making cuts elsewhere. However, in many cases, it is possible to remove at least some lines from a conversation and keep the same meaning.

If every line of dialogue is vital, consider if there is a way of rearranging these that makes more sense and avoids you having to repeat information already stated earlier. Break your dialogue down into sections and try different orders to determine if there is repetition you can remove. How well does the dialogue flow? Are there any areas it would make sense to combine? To cut a few more words, look at your dialogue tags, such as “said”, “asked”, and “exclaimed”. Assuming you can still tell who is speaking, dialogue tags can mostly be removed. You can also remove filler words, such as “um”, “er”, and “well”. While these reflect real speech, they are not necessary for a novel.

Repetition

You may also be able to cut a number of words by removing any repetition. This can be as simple as repeating the same information in a single conversation, meaning that you can cut out a few sentences here. Alternatively, there may be whole sections of description or exposition that you have duplicated without realising. To find these, break your book down into sections, summarising what happens in each one and what the reader should know after. This will highlight any passages that could be reduced, combined, or deleted.

Context

It is also worth considering the context of your writing. A lot of the time you might find that you have ended up explaining how your characters feel rather than simply showing this, either by the preceding events or how they react to them. Trust that your readers will understand emotions from the context in which you have framed the scene.

You can also rely on context to show the motivations and significance of a scene. Even if you don’t have a lot of words to cut, removing unnecessary description that could be better shown by context will improve your book. Streamlining helps to pace your book and keep readers interested.

Wrapping Up

I hope that this helps you to cut your word count down a bit! In my next blog post, we will be looking at the opposite problem – how to increase your word count! Do come back in a couple of weeks if this is what your novel needs.

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