Editing

The last couple of days I've been whittling down a 6000 word manuscript to just under 5000 words.  5000 seems to be a sweet spot in terms of short stories; when a manuscript gets much larger, it becomes more difficult to sell -- and you have to make sure those extra words are pulling their weight.

Some of my difficulty is that I can get baroque in my writing style:  playing with the lyricism until I've passed popular taste in convolution -- or else fixating description on and getting too detailed over minutia because I like verbal eye candy.

In this particular case, I managed to squeeze out about 450 words simply by looking for some of the usual suspects -- "started to," "tried to," "only," "was," and "it was," and "began to" -- and recast various weak, passive, or convoluted phrases.   The search function helped find places where I'd strayed into using danger words.   I got fifty to a hundred words out by noticing repeated phrases (usually describing the protagonist's heart rate or breathing) and removing extraneous ones.

Probably the most difficult cut was deleting the first two pages -- the original opening scene provided some nice setting and character background, but there was enough spread throughout the rest of the manuscript that I could justify it's removal (telling myself that if the story is ever re-published, I might add the deleted scene back).

The happiest moment was discovering during a read-aloud that I'd pasted in a section twice.  When I deleted it I got about thirty words, which I used to insert a particular detail I'd liked, but didn't provide quite enough character development to justify.

I'm going back and forth a little on the voice.  On the "it's working" hand, this manuscript has been making the rounds and getting "interesting-but-no" rejections; so I think it's serviceable.   On the "needs work" hand, I wrote the original version some years ago the beginner's craftwork shows.  But back on the first hand, the voice in the original is strong, and whittling it down has blunted the voice... which might be a good thing... even if the writing feels a little formulaic.

Anyway, it's reached the point where tinkering with it any more is either going to fatigue the manuscript or push it back over the word count.