How About Cutting?

Hi people!

This will be a post about the craft - specifically about what I've learned in the years I've been writing and how to cut/how to know what to cut.

1.) The most important thing about writing is to cut. Less is more. Much more. You need to learn to weed out shiny-sparkly 'darlings' and cut your manuscript down to the roots. This doesn't mean to axe all the things you like about your work. It means to axe these shiny sparkly parts which have nothing to do with the story.

I know it's difficult. It's difficult to know what to cut. It's difficult to know precisely what you want to say. And I'll give you a fair warning before you read on: You'll need a lot of courage to cut. And you might need a lot of TIME too.

It's even more difficult to say exactly what you want in fewer words. But it's also much more effective and will make your manuscript much more powerful. (Note: this is why short stories are often more powerful than a full novel. They have one - at max two or three - condensed idea and the whole 5-10k deals with only this one concept. This gives the writer lots of space to deal with one or two issues they want to address.)

You set out to write a story about a young man who's trying to solve the disappearance of children in an advanced future... and you end up with an amnesiac constructed human trying to understand why he loves another person more than himself when - in his point of view - they've never met. And even then, after you're done with your first draft, it's still difficult. There's lots of words, sentences, annotations (yes, I annotate in the middle of the text!), that just don't... belong. But then you delete something... and suddenly you have no idea any more why it needed to disappear, why you wrote the story in the first place, and everything simply collapses.

But how? Where do you even start? How do you find the roots of the manuscript? What are the roots of a manuscript? I think of it this way. The roots are like an orchid. They're visible at the top of the soil... but not overly so. You see, there's this pesky thing called 'Theme' (I'll post about this too at some point). Theme is the 'message' of the story, which should be many things, excluding a sermon about what you believe is true/right in the world. Theme, to a good writer, an experienced person, comes naturally, and if it doesn't, there's plenty of pointers on what it is. (Note II: I plan to compile a 'Resources' post with links and book recommendations that helped me learn more about craft in the hopes you'll also find them useful.)

2.) Why do you even want to cut? Isn't your manuscript good as it is? Probably. But you want it to be shiny, right? You want it to sparkle.

a.) You want to be clear and concise.
This is important. You want to tell the story as you envisioned it - nothing more and nothing less. I've been thinking about this for a while now, and I've been playing around with format. The latest short story I finished is complete at ~17,000 words. Why? Because this is the story. I could fluff it up, sure, just add another subplot, or two, but really, these 17,000 words (knowing me, it'll be 20,000 by the end), are enough. They tell the story as it is supposed to be told. And remember: you can always flesh it out/add more detail afterward.

I know. There is a lot of things you want to say and you don't have to be as sparse as me of course. But too much clutter can lead to problems (of boredome of fatigue or just such confusion you don't even know any more what story you wanted to tell or where you wanted to begin it). This could be because:

b.) 1.) You're trying to put too much into the novel. I used to have a problem with this and I developed a question to ask myself after it happened: Is this your last novel? Will you never write anything again? Most of these things, these shiny scenes, these cool characters who have nothing to do with the plot/any of the plots, but you still want them there, are a 'darling', and the opposite of the 'root'.

b.) 2.) You have a great character you love and you want him in the story? Desperately? But somehow you can't squeeze him in there without seriously breaking some other part of the plot? Drop him like he's the sun! He's shiny. He's sparkly. He's brilliant? He also doesn't have anything to do with your story! - Let him go. He'll come back to you when the time is right. Perhaps in your next story?

I had to drop a few characters (including an antagonist) when re-writing The Descendant of Ra. It was just too much... and I couldn't even follow the story any more myself. But after cutting him... nothing really changed about the story, and it's actually better.

You have a cool scene/setting you absolutely must have? Yes. You must. But perhaps not in the story you're currently working on.

This also applies to plot twists, plot points, cool objects, mysterious symbols, et cetera.
Don't worry, though. It isn't as bad as it seems.
At some point, when you've done enough stories, and scenes, and characters, you'll get a feel for it. How many, do you say, are enough? Well, I've finished 7 books, plenty of short stories (a great medium to learn about clear/concise/coherent plots and enticing characters and also to polish your prose), and hundreds of scenes/scene starts, ends, middles, about too many characters to count.

I've discovered it's better to write too little (though perhaps there's also a limit to what is way too little) than too much. You can always add information later if it's necessary (if you're interested check my process on TDR). However, if you have a 190k behemoth of a manuscript, then it'll be very painful to cut.

I hope this helped! Next week's post will be about critique and why it's important! In the meantime... check out my short stories and see if they're overly populated. Is there too much fluff? Too little fluff (in the way that it starts to feel clinical)? Have a good week!
J.M.