After receiving feedback from a couple of key reviewers, I have decided to shorten my novel considerably before submitting to more agents. Thus, my current project is to cut about 77,000 words in hopes of hitting a length closer to recommended industry standards for literary and upmarket fiction. When all is said and done, I hope the book will be just under 100,000 words.

When I shared this goal with a friend, saying that I needed to make the novel shorter, he asked, “Does it need to be shorter or simply more precise?” What a wonderful question. I’ve used it as a guide as I decide what to cut and what to keep. Does a scene move the story forward in a precise way? Does a description cut to the core of a landscape or character? Can I say the same thing with one word instead of ten?

I have identified a good handful of scenes that I could cut without really affecting the main arc of the story, and so I pulled those out wholesale even when it pained me to do so. But by and large, I have made most cuts by evaluating the precision of the line-by-line writing. After reviewing whether every scene is truly serving the story, I have tried to cut each chapter by one third. I do the math, set a target word count, and start asking myself if every scene, every paragraph, every line, and every word is earning its keep. I have cut over 60,000 words so far, and most of them have pained me. To ease the sting, I cut and paste longer passages into a “notes” file for each chapter. Then all that (I think) beautiful but nonessential (probably) writing doesn’t get totally deleted. It’s mostly a mind game, but it helps. And if I need to, I can always go back and find a sentence or paragraph to reintroduce.

Additionally, I’ve discovered a few “easy” cuts. Initially, I wasn’t using contractions in the main narrative, choosing to write out “will not,” “do not,” “is not,” etc. Doing a find and replace search of those common contractions cut nearly 2,000 words from the novel. I also tend to describe things through the point of view of a character when I could simply state what is happening. For example, “She watched the horses stamp in the dusty corral” becomes “The horses stamped in the dusty corral.” And in that same example, chances are that I can cut “dusty” because I’ve probably already described the corral in some way in another sentence. Taking a close look at descriptive action (“he paused,” “he walked to the door,”) and choosing one detail or action instead of listening three or four has also yielded a high number of deleted words.

Ultimately, I hope that cutting the story down makes it more marketable and gives it a better chance of making it to readers. I also believe that the novel will be better—easier to read and more tightly paced—as a result. I am learning a lot about my own writing style through this revision. I’m a maximalist and will likely always “over-write” my drafts, which means I will need to be committed to precision in each subsequent rewrite and edit. Have I spent some time wishing I’d done this work a year ago, and certainly before I sent to my first round of agents? You bet. But agonizing about the past is extraneous and unproductive work, so I’m cutting it out and moving the story forward.