I finished a short story this afternoon that I intend to enter into The Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition. Actually, I finished the story more than a week ago, but I had to trim it, and by trim it, I mean cut it to the bone. You see, the competition has a word count limit of 4,000 words, and my story came in at 4,952. That meant I needed to cut roughly 20% of the story in order for it to be eligible for the contest.
This isn't something new. I'm an old hand at editing. I just had to put the story away and come back to it with fresh eyes, so I let it sit on my computer, untouched, for a week. I then went back in and started cutting.
At first, I thought, This is a breeze. I found lots of extraneous words, so I was slashing lines like I was a killer from a low budget horror flick. I hacked and slashed, and by the end, I felt pretty good...except that I was still nearly 200 words over the limit. That was disheartening.
Going back in this morning, I reworded and cut again until I felt like I wasn't just trimming fat, but rather had reached bone. I've had a shoulder surgery where they shaved some bone, so imagine that pain, but with a story. The story is 11 pages, so I had to average cutting over 15 words a page. By the end of the first page, I'd cut...12 words. That was when I knew that this would be harder than I thought.
All writers despair at cutting their babies. We're so certain that our words matter, that the story will lose meaning if we cut too much. Unfortunately, I had no choice here if I wanted to enter this tale. So I cut. And I cut. Then I cut some more. Finally, on the far end, I was down to 3993 words. I still wonder if I left in some extraneous stuff I could've gotten rid of so I could keep more descriptive parts of the story, but it's done. I will send it off this week, and someone else can tell me how I did.
That doesn't make this any easier. Cutting a story near and dear to you is always hard, and it never gets easier.
This isn't something new. I'm an old hand at editing. I just had to put the story away and come back to it with fresh eyes, so I let it sit on my computer, untouched, for a week. I then went back in and started cutting.
At first, I thought, This is a breeze. I found lots of extraneous words, so I was slashing lines like I was a killer from a low budget horror flick. I hacked and slashed, and by the end, I felt pretty good...except that I was still nearly 200 words over the limit. That was disheartening.
Going back in this morning, I reworded and cut again until I felt like I wasn't just trimming fat, but rather had reached bone. I've had a shoulder surgery where they shaved some bone, so imagine that pain, but with a story. The story is 11 pages, so I had to average cutting over 15 words a page. By the end of the first page, I'd cut...12 words. That was when I knew that this would be harder than I thought.
All writers despair at cutting their babies. We're so certain that our words matter, that the story will lose meaning if we cut too much. Unfortunately, I had no choice here if I wanted to enter this tale. So I cut. And I cut. Then I cut some more. Finally, on the far end, I was down to 3993 words. I still wonder if I left in some extraneous stuff I could've gotten rid of so I could keep more descriptive parts of the story, but it's done. I will send it off this week, and someone else can tell me how I did.
That doesn't make this any easier. Cutting a story near and dear to you is always hard, and it never gets easier.
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