Too Wordy...

Right now I'm in the process of eliminating all of my excess words. I take each sentence and each paragraph and I look at them and think, "Can I say this in less words?" and if I can, I do. Even if it's less by just one word.

Yes, I need to get my word count down THAT badly.

slay your darlings. Slash the sentences until you have their essences. Sticking dialogue in won't fix the wordy sentences.

Prepositional phrases are my bane. I go through an editing pass just for them.

Deirdre said:

Prepositional phrases are my bane. I go through an editing pass just for them.

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I'm seconding this. There are sooo many that can be cut without losing meaning.

1. Look at your adjectives. Kill anything that's two-in-a-row. "The hot, bright sun beat down on the dry, dusty desert." --> "The bright sun beat down on the dusty desert." When selecting kills, spare the word that is most illustrative, and definitely kill the words that are redundant. (Deserts, for instance, are usually dry.)

2. Look at your adjective survivors. Kill anything that's redundant. This is indeed a second pass.

3. Look at your -ly adverbs. Kill all anything that's two-in-a-row. "He joyfully, happily ran down the road." Again, spare anything truly illustrative, kill just about everything else.

4. Look at your surviving -ly adverbs. Kill anything that's redundant or replace with word that means "blahly doing-something". "He quickly ran down the road" --> "He sprinted down the road".

5. Look for repetition -- of sounds, of words, of sentences, of illustrations. Kill all but the best one (where "best" means "fits", and not necessarily most purple).

6. If you have excess characters (who do nothing) or excess setting (that does nothing for tone or characterization or plot), gut them.

7. Compress any other phrases you can find into single words if possible. "He sat down beside a table that had papers scattered all over it" -> "He sat down beside a table bestrewn with papers"

8. Kill prepositions as much as possible.

9. Anything that uses a "to be"? See if it sounds better when you nuke the "to be" and possibly change things around. "He sat down beside a table that was bestrewn with papers" -> "He sat down beside a table bestrewn with papers"

10. For ultimate mind bend, use a POV character who does not think wordy. This helps you get into the head of someone else more easily. For really ultimate mind bend, do it as first person POV (if it fits your work). That is what ultimately drove down my wordiness in my WIP.

-- queen of fwordy

I do a "be, do, have, get" pass, too. There are lots of weak verbs, but those are the four I tend to overuse. (God this post is ironic. Metaironic, even.)

Based on how I tighten, concentrate on eliminating repetition, over-explaining, over-describing, long internalizations, and dialogue that circles back to subjects or conclusions.

First novel? Finish, then cut 10%. If you'd like to get practice now, go ahead and look at each chapter and do a word count. 2500 words? Cut 250 of them. It's amazing what you can learn by having a target cut rate.

Especially when you've cut 249 out of 250, but you're too anal to be satisfied with that.

I'll take your extras. I'm not nearly wordy enough on the first pass. I add words on my second draft.

First cut the weak verbs and adverbs and replace them with stronger, more precise verbs. Then cut your adjectives, especially compound adjectives. Chop up your long sentences to smaller chunks. Trim the repetitions and redundancies (say it only once). Use sentence fragments if appropriate. Use more precise imageries instead of using more than a sentence or two to describe something. Use words and sentences that convey more than one meaning -- use subtexts if necessary. And last but not least: less is more sometimes; you don't have to explain everything.

Get outside the flow of the story. The best way I know of to do this is to start at the end, read and analyze each individual sentence, individually and in isolation from the rest of the story, advancing toward the beginning. Does that adjective, that adverb, that prepositional phrase, that dependent clause, really need to be there? Does it actually function, or is it a flourish, an extra bit of frosting on the cake, a gingerbread ornament on the porch of the house? A thing that sucks the energy out of the sentence?

Oh, yeah, and read each one aloud, for rhythm, sound, sense, as you go.

caw

"The bright sun beat down on the dusty desert." When selecting kills, spare the word that is most illustrative, and definitely kill the words that are redundant. (Deserts, for instance, are usually dry.) ~ true, dat. i was going to say kill the 'bright' as the sun tends to kind of glowy, lol.

9. Anything that uses a "to be"? See if it sounds better when you nuke the "to be" and possibly change things around. "He sat down beside a table that was bestrewn with papers" -> "He sat down beside a table bestrewn with papers" ~ basically, use an active voice. passive verbs, for lack of a better term, usually requires some supporting words to make the sentence work. probably the worst offenders i've found is 'had' 'were' and 'was' (though not technically a 'passive verb,' it often makes the sentence sound passive. most 'was' can be removed outright if you're not careful with how you use it, but don't feel as if every single 'was' needs to go. if you're using 'was' excessively, it's a safe bet quite a bit of it can flatly go).

'Chop up your long sentences to smaller chunks.' ~ you often can combine short sentences into longer ones and wind up saving a few words, so i'm on the fence as to whether or not to disagree with this as a generality because it's true, but it'd only half the picture.

i have a short excercise for you to do, shouldn't take but a few hours, if that. go to SYW and pick out a story or chapter, c/p into a separate file. do an actual word count and figure out what twenty percent of that is (ten percent is too easy). this is how many words to take out of that story or chapter. do not stop until you figure out ways to reach the 20% mark. there's no need for anyone to see what you've done to their story (you're more than welcome to use something of mine if you want, you'll find a lot of long passages of mine in the 'hook me' thread), as it's just an excercise.

passive voice? obliterated. and i mean gone. weaks phrases? you'll find plenty of small three word phrases that's readily replaced with a 'perfect' word. adverbs? ka-blooie! the trick is to not start sentences off with -ing words that makes the sentence have conflicting actions (continuous tense, if i recall the term). it's a nice excercise because it's not your own material, but it'll point out just how wordy we can be. (note, this isn't to say you should write like this. it's taking things to the extreme for most of us. but you really, really, really have to cut out 20% for it to work, even if you have to, gasp, rearrange and do some minour rewriting.) you'll notice prepositional words like 'up' can be cut 90% of the time.

it's a great excercise, and i'm confident that you'll find a lot of benefits for having done it.

Sometimes you want long sentences in there too. I had a lot of short sentences in my story and my editor has combined quite a few of them to give it more balance and they look better now. I'm glad she's got some experience at this cause i suck at editing lol.

Of course, I did have that problem too, you know too much detail. She suggested leaving some of it out and letting the reader catch some of it and just put in some hints of others. And some were added in the end instead of mixing them in the middle to make the reader wonder and keep reading to find out. I think it's turning out much better this way for my story. I was trying to tell the story in more than one POV and she switched it to just one, also making the story better. I did a lot of rewriting some of the scenes to make one POV work. A second POV was introduced at the end to reveal the other details that I had left out at her request. I am so thankful for editors!

Amber

Be careful about tightening for the sake of tightening: Your sentences will look like stumps, and your body of text will read like a first time driver of a stick shift.

From my experience recently, and from my personal taste, I learned that if you can glance over a sentence without actually reading it, and it makes sense as in you glean the core essence of it, then that will mean that what you have is:

1) Simple 2)Direct and it 3)Communicates

I have poured over different authors to write the excerpt I posted today in the SYW horror board if you're interested in finding out what I did. It is amazing what you can do with sentence structure, and I do not mean technically either. I'm not a grammar wizard, but I do know there are two choices that can be done for an enjoyable read. You can blow it out with pizzazz, or you can melt the reader into the story like smooth butter. See what I did by describing those two choices? I wrote them in the way I was trying to convey my point Both require something different, but holy moly when it works, it really works. Especially for chapter openers.

Bold writing usually indicates not action, but stuff happening does help, but it appears to indicate descriptive stuff. Once you see it, you'll know it. For example -- holding a strawberry ice cream cone. . . Those six words can jump out. But when you say -- ran and then jumped into the air and fired his gun. . .That last action just falls flat. It is lifeless, yet it describes action. Just look at the words used. Another example instead of neato words -- passed Portland going north on the turnpike. . .

So maybe what I'm trying to say is, it isn't the happening action that is bold, but what is bold writing is word choice to describe. Here is a last one that features action -- jamming on his brakes and laying both hands on the horn. See what I mean?

I think if you think of writing first person tense, it could give a headstart in your sentence construction when writing 3rd person.

I thought I'd try and share what I learned.


**First ice cream example is from the novel Kindred Spirit and the last two traveling examples are from Salem's Lot. The crappy action example with the gun is what I came up with on the spot.

Over the past three weeks I've boiled my 102,000 word first draft down to (today) 87,000 words. I've not changed the plot, cut any characters or made any wholesale changes. Here are some of the things I did:

Sometimes I say the same thing twice, with slightly different words.

Sometimes chunks of dialogue are irrelevant.

Sometimes I move the characters around with too many stage directions. After someone arrives, you don't have to describe them putting the park brake on, switching off the engine, removing their seatbelt ... in fact, you might like to cut to the confrontation. Most travel is boring unless it's relevant to the plot in some way.

Sometimes I describe a room or basic furniture, when it really doesn't matter. An office visited once in the entire book for five minutes doesn't need a description.

Often you can reduce two sentences to one, keeping the essence.

In dialogue, you can often skip reaction lines. ("You're kidding!" "You don't say" "Then what?" and so on.)

Having said all that, I don't apply any of these techniques when I'm still trying to refine the plot. Today's irrelevance might be tomorrow's turning point.

SuzyB said:

See, I tend to go crazy with words my first time around and then edit later. I think that is the best option for me right now otherwise I will drown in my words, and quickly.

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And I betcha write on computer.

I would make the suggestion that you get off the computer, learn how to comfortably write fiction on paper, do that for some time, then eventually rotate back on the computer (but never exclusively) and watch as you begin to write tighter.........but I don't expect anyone to take that advice.

spacejock2 said:

Over the past three weeks I've boiled my 102,000 word first draft down to (today) 87,000 words. I've not changed the plot, cut any characters or made any wholesale changes. Here are some of the things I did:

Sometimes I say the same thing twice, with slightly different words.

Sometimes chunks of dialogue are irrelevant.

Sometimes I move the characters around with too many stage directions. After someone arrives, you don't have to describe them putting the park brake on, switching off the engine, removing their seatbelt ... in fact, you might like to cut to the confrontation. Most travel is boring unless it's relevant to the plot in some way.

Sometimes I describe a room or basic furniture, when it really doesn't matter. An office visited once in the entire book for five minutes doesn't need a description.

Often you can reduce two sentences to one, keeping the essence.

In dialogue, you can often skip reaction lines. ("You're kidding!" "You don't say" "Then what?" and so on.)

Having said all that, I don't apply any of these techniques when I'm still trying to refine the plot. Today's irrelevance might be tomorrow's turning point.

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I was about to post most of the same points I'm especially guilty of saying the same thing in a slightly different way.

The only way I fix these issues is to read through and justify every single word. If I can't, the word goes.

spacejock2 said:

Sometimes chunks of dialogue are irrelevant.

Sometimes I move the characters around with too many stage directions.... in fact, you might like to cut to the confrontation. Most travel is boring unless it's relevant to the plot in some way.

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These two are something to watch out for. I've seen dialogue that just got lengthy with chitchats. We need to remember that dialogue is just a simulation of real conversation; get to the point. Stage directions - yes. Too much "he walked... he strode... " etc. I agree that unless the travel and the "details" of the travel are relevant to the plot or setting, skip it -- cut right to the point when he enters the room.

'Be careful about tightening for the sake of tightening: Your sentences will look like stumps, and your body of text will read like a first time driver of a stick shift.' ~ possibly, but not necessarily. if you actually do that excercise i suggested, you'll wind up with a nice mix. like i said, sometimes when you combine short sentences you ferret out a few small words in the process.

what spackjock said was really good. when i critique, i'll come across all of these things with enough frequency to think it's part of the process. granted, no one wants a 'white room,' but sometimes people go overboard with description. i know i do. i also used to be really bad about reinforcing what was already there, but all i was really doing was repeating myself in a slightly different way.

pd's advice about writing on paper is a good one, imo. i'm pretty sure it's been proven this produces better writing.

it's hard for me to say how a story 'flows.' for me, what happens has to be given its proper space depending on the importance of what it is. entering a room and opening the window can be said just like that unless it's got some kind of significance, then it could go on for paragraphs. what i can say is that i like a variety of sentences structures. too, there are a dozen ways to indicate who a speaker is without using the 'biff said' dialogue tag at the end.

i'm not sure what 'act of a scene' really means. some folk operate in a very structured way, each scene having a beginning, middle and end, and inside that they work the same structure into their dialogue. it works for some, not so much for others. and even while i *tend* to leave cliffhangers at the end of a chapter, sometimes it's not appropriate.

something else i do, which i'm not quite sure if it works or not (and i do this quite often in a post), is to follow a technique i gleaned from reading professional op-ed pieces and humour articles. it's something they must teach, but i just happened to figure it out on my own, lol. open up the newspaper and find said op-ed or humour article, and you'll find a main idea early on that's expounded upon, then the very last sentence will sum the whole thing up and have a lot of power. (i've noticed this more in humour pieces, so i suggest you start there. it's hard to describe this early in the morning, but it's pretty easy to recognize if you know what you're looking for.)

how do you use description? when you figure that one out, let me know, lol. some things you can allude to, others are implied, some has to be laid out in no uncertain terms. sometimes you need a bit of detail, sometimes not. someone's space in the cubicle farm may not need much, but you're probably not there to establish much of a mood, eh? then again, if you want to mention the personalization of that space in an attempt to resist unsanity, i think it has to serve a purpose. so, i don't think there's any formula to it, really, and it's one of those things you have to study and figure out what way best suits your storytelling method. you're likely to study different methods and cobble together your own way of doing things. it's impossible to say what details will attribute a great mood to a place without knowing specifics (though there are some likely helpful suggestions). some aver three details are all you need, no more, no less (and then slip in a few more through dialogue or character first impressions). some writers absolutely refuse to give up a character description, but i feel that's strongly dependant on the genre and reader expectation.

Flow

For me, it's more instinct that anything. I don't worry about tightening, about lengthening, about phrases, etc. For me, it's all about sound, and simply how it reads.

I don't look for any specific thing to cut or change. It's simply about how smooth it sounds in my head when I read it. If there's a bump, I level the bump, no matter what the bump is, or why it's there.

It's all about did I say what I wanted to say, and say it in a way that sounds good?

Says what I mean, sounds good, rolls off the tongue. If it does this, I leave it alone. If it doesn't do this, I change it.

I don't worry specifically about wordiness, and I don't specifically slay my darlings. It takes as many words as it takes, and if I like something enough to think of it as a darling, it will probably stay in. For me, sound and meaning are everything.

preyer, your post is too wordy.

One of my bêtes noires is qualifying words: very, rather, somewhat, almost, often, sort of, kind of, etc. I always have a pile of those to eliminate in revision. (Along with many of the other failings already mentioned.)