Five tips to trim your book

This is short, I promise.

A post about trimming wordcount? From me? Especially considering the length of my last several letters? Not to mention my books?¹

It’s okay if you’re shocked. But this one really is short, I promise.

On a Reddit thread that became related to trimming wordcount — because of paper shortages, shelf space, and other considerations — I shared a few tips I’ve learned over the years, having to trim down many long books:

• Map out what every scene does. If two scenes do the same thing, combine them. If you have a scene that doesn't do anything, cut it. (If it has important information or character development you don't want to lose, you can always find a different place to put it.)

• Look at the function of every viewpoint character. Do they all serve a purpose in this story? Or are some getting viewpoints in the first book because they'll be bigger players in future books? If it's possible to trim someone's viewpoint in this book, do it. It's okay to add them back in a later book when they're needed. The character can stay in the book! This is just about scenes told from their point of view.

  • Do the same thing with subplots.

• Look for places that announce what is about to happen and then the description of what happens. Cut the announcement.

• Look for circular lines of thought — like starting off with how unfair it is that X character did Y action, then taking a little tangent to a different but related thought, and then getting back to the unfairness of X doing Y. Combine the repeated bits.

• And finally, look for places where you use five words when one would do, or sentences that give unnecessary information (like repeating the color of someone's hair or always showing exactly where a character is looking). Removing wordcount by a thousand cuts can be tough, but you'd be surprised what you can trim if you're determined.

Start with the bigger things — scene, plot, and character level stuff. Then go narrower if you still need to make it tighter.

This isn’t a comprehensive list. It’s not The Law. But it’s a place to start.

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A couple of years ago, my agent told me to trim my 60k manuscript down to 50k. I insisted that it was already as short as it could be. In fact, it was the shortest thing I'd ever written.² And it was half the length of my last book. Half!

Then she told me that if I couldn’t do it on my own, she could help me find things to trim.

And boy did that feel like my mom coming into my room with a black trash bag to “help me clean.” Using the above tips, I got the book down to 50k. It was so hard. I felt like I was cutting out so many good things. I saved them all in a “cut stuff” file because I thought I’d just . . . sneak them back in when she wasn’t looking.

But when I reread the manuscript earlier this year to work on it again, I didn’t even miss the stuff I'd cut.

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If you liked this, be sure to share it! And let me know what your favorite trimming tips are in the comments.

1. Want to know my wordcounts? INCARNATE is 82k. ASUNDER is about 87k, I think? And INFINITE might be 91k.

THE ORPHAN QUEEN is somewhere around 96k, and THE MIRROR KING is 126k.

The Janies books are mostly somewhere between 115k - 120k, until MY IMAGINARY MARY which is about 110k.

BEFORE SHE IGNITES is 101k — that’s actually shorter than I thought it was — while AS SHE ASCENDS and WHEN SHE REIGNS are 115k and 113k respectively.

NIGHTRENDER is 125k and DAWNBREAKER is 120k.

2. Not counting the digital novellas for the INCARNATE books and THE ORPHAN QUEEN books, I guess. Those were pretty short.