Scene level revisions 1: Cutting down words

Hi everyone,

This month I’ve been tightening my scenes and cutting down at least 20-30% of their word count. Basically, how I’m doing this is I take my mini beat sheet and I highlight each beat in the scene and note how much percentage space each beat takes up. It tells me what is too long or what is irrelevant.

For example, if I stay in the status quo for too long.-eg more than 10% of the scene. I try to cut it down. Also if the midpoint comes at 30% of the scene because the second half is far too long, I’ll cut down the ‘bad guys close in section’ until the percentages are, if not correct (it’s a scene and not a novel so there’s more freedom in terms of percentages), better, tighter. When I’m happy with the beats, and the goal is clear, I read over the scene again and again cutting words as I go with a specific word target in mind.  I keep trying to count how many times I read the scene before I hit my target word count and I always lose count. Some scenes take a read through of ten times. Some about five. Those are my guesses. Each scene takes one full day unless it is a short scene. Or sometimes super messy. I fly through cutting the word count and finish in record time! During this process I am making sentences sound better and doing other line level stuff too, like I’ll try to make dialogue more distinctive while deleting words etc.

I kept track of all the words I cut in excel as a motivator and to see my progress.

Here are the words cut from scene 10-20 (a long table was too hard to read so I just took a chunk here-I didn’t take the beginning chapters because I edited them within an inch of their lives for my romance course and cutting more words was harder and less representative of my entire process)

Column 1 = scene number; Column = original word count; Column 3 = new word/final word count; Column 4 = % cut of the scene.

Scene. Original. New. Cut. % Cut

S10 2880 2150 730 25.35%

S11 2703 1831 872 32.26%

S12 3945 2260 1685. 42.71%

S13 3200 2056 1144 35.75%

S14 2807 2100 707 25.19%

S15 1648 1259 389 23.60%

S16 1694 1263 431 25.44%

S17 2596 2229 367 14.14%

S18 1269 942 327 25.77%

S19 2625 1939 686 26.13%

S20 1552 662 890 57.35%

I’m on track to finish on July 1st. There are two weeks in June where I won’t be able to work on the book—I’m overseas, so during that time I’ll instigate my one word daily minimum word count goal. If I have any more time (I’ll be super jet lagged, so probably not), I’ll work on the scenes. If in the two weeks I get through two scenes, I’ll be super happy, but that’s a bonus. I’ll have a lot of time to work on them in during last week of June and I should be able to finish then.

I won’t post June as I barely have time to write.

I’ll see you in July, hopefully having gone through all of my scenes once and cut 20-30% off the majority of them.

Happy writing, or deleting,

Joanne.