Got a rejection letter yesterday, but at least it wasn't a form letter, plus it said that the story "Almost worked," so I suppose that's better than "Didn't work at all" or "Completely sucked" or "I've had more enjoyable root canals." (You have to take the small victories where you can find them.)
So I went to the next market on my list and noticed they have a 5000 word limit. Oops. My story was 5600 words. Hmmmmm.
I've cut stories before, trying the meet the word count, but the end result was never good. It probably would have been better if I'd just sent those markets different, shorter stories or just sent the longer stories somewhere else.
But I thought I'd have a go at trimming this one down. Turns out it made the story much stronger. I found several places where my first-person narrator said roughly the same thing in two different ways and a few other sentences that read like digressions. Losing those 600 extra words really wasn't that hard. They needed to be cut.
What do you say? Does cutting for word count ever make your stories stronger? It did for me in this case, but I'm thinking maybe that's not the norm. Let me know.
2 comments:
Yes. No. Sometimes.
I don't cut easily -- usually if I'm proofing, I find something which needs to be fixed, or something which needs to be added -- and the result is longer. (grin) But yes, there's cutting and there's cutting.
I'm sure there's a bias against bumping against the top word count, especially as using say Microsoft's Word Count isn't the way most editors count or used to count. (double-grin) So my 5000 words might be longer than someone else's 5000 words.
I once got bounced for something because it was over -- and it wasn't over at the last count. However, in formatting for printing, I'd changed en-dashes into pairs of hyphens for better readability in Courier. Turns out the latter are considered words by Word Count, the former are not. I changed back and returned it and the manuscript was accepted -- I'd gone from over the word count to under and that was all that was needed.
Capricious, but necessary.
Dr. Phil
I tend to "no," bearing in mind that there's a big difference in getting a 5600 word story down to 5000 and a 1600 word story down to 1000. There are several times when I have done the kind of paring down you mention, where you look for all of the redundacies and unnecessary verbiage. But that doesn't usually get me much. Then you're into changing sentence structure and plot or pacing. I usually leave off there. Generally, I'll just look for another market that will take my word count.
Post a Comment