Dear O'Abby: What do I do if my book is too long?

 Dear O'Abby,

I've been working on my first novel for about five years now, and finally got it to the point where I felt it was ready to show other people.  So I joined a critique group.  They seem like nice people and several of them have published more than one novel, so I'd hoped they would be helpful in getting my book into some kind of shape.

Well, they have, to a degree.  But all of them agree that my 146,000 word novel is too long.  I've already cut it down from over 200,000 words, so I'm not sure what else I need to do.  I feel like if I cut too much more, the book won't make sense.

Can you help?

Best,

Longwinded.

Dear Longwinded,

I'm afraid I'd have to agree with your group.  146,000 words is too long for a debut novel.  Around 100,000 is the upper limit for most adult novels with around 70,000 being standard for YA.  Fantasy can sometimes run a little higher because of the amount of world building required to set up a fantasy world, but if you're getting close to 120,000, you need to take a good hard look at what you've written.

There are a number of ways to start paring word count if you feel like you're too long.  I like to go through each chapter and remove all those pesky filtering words like just, believed, thought, quite, wondered etc.  You can usually cut a good chunk out just by doing this.

You can also search for redundant words and phrases.  Things like "she nodded her head."  I mean, what else would she nod?  And adverbs can often be redundant too.  If someone is walking quietly down the hall, see if you can find a verb that would better describe the action.  Maybe he's creeping down the hall, or shuffling, or tiptoeing.  All of these words convey something more than just moving quietly and can tell the reader something about the character and his intentions as well as describing the action.

Read through every scene and make sure what you're describing is relevant to the story and/or the characters.  If you have a paragraph describing the outside of a house, that house needs to be important.  What it looks like needs to mean something to the character looking at it.  If neither of these things are true, do you need to describe the outside of the house in that much detail?  Sometimes a broad description works just as well if the scenery is not critical to the plot or character.

You can do the same thing with your action scenes.  Are your characters doing mundane things like making tea or drawing a bath?  You can just say that's what they are doing.  You don't need to outline their actions as they do them unless the way they make tea or draw a bath is important to the plot or gives important information about the character.  

Read your dialogue passages closely.  While you want dialogue to sound natural, you can often cut a lot of dialogue out because people say a lot of stuff that doesn't mean anything.  Only keep the things people say that actually mean something.

Basically, every word of your novel needs to count either as something that drives the plot or something that colours your characters.  If you have stuff in there that does neither, it can go.

Hopefully that helps...  Best of luck with your novel!

X O'Abby

Before the Query Stage, and What I've Learned Editing a Second Draft

We hear it all the time. Finish what you start. Complete that novel. And we do. We write "THE END" and jump in the air. (Cue marching band.)

Until we realize, we just completed a first draft. Which is fantastic. But it's still only one piece of the journey. (Send marching band back to the rehearsal room.)

I've done NaNo WriMo before, and even adapted an excel spreadsheet from it when I'm drafting. But for me, drafting isn't the issue. I'm usually good about meeting my word counts and getting words on the page in an efficient manner.

This often feels like this:

But after NaNo ends...then what? We don't hear a lot about what to do after first draft is on the page (or perhaps after the second or third draft is done either). Perhaps it's because drafting is sexier than editing. Editing is work. Drafting is fun! But one of my previous NaNo novels was so messy that I wasn't able to get it off the ground at all, and it's currently sitting in a drawer waiting for me to sell it for parts.

And maybe someday I will. But right now, I'm almost 200 pages revised into the second draft of a manuscript I drafted last year. The story is shaping up much differently than when I first wrote it, which means, after I finish this pass through, I'll need to trunk the novel again, bring it out of moth balls, and edit it at least once or twice more before showing it to beta readers.

This process is more like this:

I was lucky enough to land on this blog post called "Braving Your Second Draft." It said: "Each draft is an essential step on the road to the completed manuscript you’re trying to write." The good news? No words are wasted, despite what I claimed in this previous post. Those anchors aren't always bad, and sometimes, they can be stabilizing, offering further proof that the true joy comes from the writing itself.

So with that in mind, here's what I've learned in my second draft edits this go-round:

1. Instead of word count, do a minimum page count.

I'm forgetting where I heard this advice, so I'm unable to cite anybody on it. But I discovered that if I grapple with at least five pages a day, and get them done, I still accomplish something. And if I do more, great. This breaks the perfectionist part of me that wants to dwell on a word and paragraph level, which is not what I should be doing at this stage, and prevents twelve hour editing binges (you think I'm joking, but this actually happened).

2. Covering a plot hole might make more, so be careful when this turns into a domino effect.

 About mid-way through the draft, I finally figured out my villain's true motivation. It went against some of what I'd written previously, and when I fixed it, more plot holes opened, and soon I was in a gopher field, with my novel progress halted. So I took a step back and only made the changes that were absolutely necessary to remain consistent with what the villain wanted. If there's more to it, I can always address it in a subsequent draft.

3. Don't be afraid of the delete key...

Once the words are down, it's hard to get rid of them, and I carry this anxiety of not getting back what I delete if I need it later. So I created a document where I could put excess stuff (including plot points that went nowhere). And I'm discovering that I'm only drawing from it rarely--it's grown to over 100 pages and 24,000 words. A novella of scraps, in other words. What this has taught me is it's okay to delete words and write new ones that are better--and the more I'm willing to part with, the better the novel will be.

4. ...but also don't be afraid to flesh out those skeletons.

All the novels I've written with the NaNo spreadsheet, even if they took a few months, ended up pretty skeletal, and those drafts always needed more fleshing out. So look for areas of expansion, and remember to go deeper instead of wider.

5. Editing can really be fun. Really.

I'm still having scads of fun with this novel and its growth spurts, so at least for now, the editing doesn't feel like work yet. I'm in the third act, when a lot of previous plot clues are answered--but also found the big reveal wasn't well established or consistent. So I wrote outside conversations between my characters to establish some clarity, which were tons of fun. And lo and behold, a plot point I didn't know was staring me in the face revealed itself, and today I combed the novel to make this detail more apparent throughout. I'm sure there are some places I missed--but I can always catch them on the next go-round.

Of course, none of this is on official deadline--so I'm curious to hear from those of you needing to make these kinds of editing decisions quickly. How do you negotiate the changes you're asked to make? 

Kill Your Darlings

"When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story." 

                                                                                                                                                                  Stephen King (On Writing)

There comes a time when we all have to commit novel carnage. It could be a minor character who does nothing for the plot. It could be our favourite scene/line/chapter that goes nowhere. But, sooner or later, we have to kill our darlings.

I'll admit that I'm a writer that has no trouble torturing my characters. As much as I enjoy creating the story on a blank page, I love the revision process. I edit ruthlessly. I'll cut adverbs and redundant dialogue tags all day, but even I'll admit that killing my darlings is hard sometimes.

We've spent hours in the worlds we create. We've poured our heart and soul into those words. We want to hug those scenes that make us giggle because we remember writing them. We send the draft off to our CP's and wait. They'll love it as much as we do, right?

Possibly. But the best thing, other than seeing a smiley face in the margin, is that they'll also notice all those little bits you are unsure of. They hone in on scenes that don't advance the plot. They suggest the line we love more than cookies could be cut to tighten the pace. They point out that character who is only in one scene and doesn't do anything. 

We can cry and stamp our feet. We can put our fingers in our ears and go "la la la la la," but it won't change what we know deep down -- sometimes we have to kill our darlings. And we ponder over it. Delete it and paste it back. Delete it and read it again. And it's better without it. So we send them into the deleted scenes file then cross our fingers we'll use them one day.

Sometimes those words have to take a sacrifice for the team.