A huge moment for me. Regular readers will note that my first novel is an unwieldy mass of words, totalling 189,000 in a genre that tops out at 85,000 words.
I crossed a boundary recently, finally getting the overage UNDER 100,000 words.
That may sound impossible to all of you, but I did that editing only about a dozen scenes – taking out some 8000 words relatively quickly. The earlier scenes are harder to edit, since the first scenes I wrote I felt I was being too brief in my wording. Later on, I developed the wordiness. Alas, if I’d kept to my initial writing style, I’d have finished editing by now!
Beginning writers often don’t trust themselves. They will go on and on and on, repeating themselves. I know I wrote the same scene four times, and deleted three of them. As you get experience, this begins to diminish.
But the realization that out of over 100 scenes I could drop the word count by 8000 or more words shows me that by simply cutting unneeded words, I can get my book down to something manageable.
You don’t want to bring a book that’s massively over the genre word count to an agent. Especially if it’s the first book you’re bringing.
