As a neo-professional writer, I often hear the advice that one must be willing to ‘kill your baby.’ Texas CPS, take note– I’m no longer a citizen of your country. And anyway, it’s a figure of speech, meaning that writers must not be afraid to viciously cut and pare and perform recuperative surgery on their pwecious widdle story-kins. It takes bravery to write a story to completion; it is the work of a disciplined barbarian to shape it into something acceptable for publication.

YAWP.

This particular post concerns something that I’ve been doing for the past couple days: word chopping. Line edits. I have been trying to cut a recently finished short-story from 7000 words down to something more manageable. Here’s the advice that I’ve found useful in this endeavor.

1) By far, the most valuable advice I’ve EVER received for editing my stories comes from the illustrious Jerry Pournelle. When I attended Writers of the Future in 2005, Jerry was one of the guest lecturers. He spoke a bit about self-editing; and while I think that writers are (rightly) leery of self-editing, there is a certain necessity for it. When I asked him how to go about cutting a 10,000 word novella down to a 7000 word short, he said that the best way to do it was to read it out loud. When you hear your voice say something stupid or unclear, you KNOW that’s something that someone else is going to have a problem with.

This method works so well, it’s almost a magic gun. I always read my work out loud now. I can trim 5-10% of my story just from a cursory reading. In addition, reading the story out loud tends to expose all the grammatical, tonal, and rhythm problems in a story.

2) Use descriptive nouns and verbs; eschew adjectives and adverbs. Rather than, “Scott ran quickly down the corridor,” use “Scott hustled down the corridor.” The best way to get your mental dictionary filled with good descriptive nouns and verbs is by reading. Every word that you cut will make a difference in the aggregate.

These two bits of advice have been essential to me in my endeavor to trim my baby’s hair.