You know, there might just be lots of extra pesky words cluttering up your manuscript now and then.
Oct 03, 2010 
See what I did there? Haha.
Anyway. It’s no big secret I’m trying to cut my manuscript right now. It needs to drop about 12,000 words to fit within the YA fantasy word limit of 100k. I’m getting a lot of help from other writers who’ve taken a look at my manuscript, especially Amie Kaufman and more recently Kat Zhang. Ultimately, though, I’m the one who has to make the call on the cuts.
Do I stand by my manuscript, and query agents with it even though it’s over the magic word limit? Or do I cut it, potentially at the expense of the story, so that it fits, and make certain I don’t alienate agents who are turned off by the high word count?
Luckily, I haven’t had to make that decision yet. I’m hoping I won’t have to, although I know that if it did come down to it, I’d choose the story over convenient word count. But see, every time I start to think “Okay, there’s just nothing else I can get rid of,” something else pops up. And the cuts that present themselves are the ones that will actually make the manuscript BETTER, not just shorter.
One thing I’ve been doing while I wait for this current round of readers to get back to me has been to cut all the extraneous words and phrases from my manuscript. I’ve read blog posts about this in the past, but always thought “Pshaw, I don’t use stupid extra words, I choose every word with care! They’re ALL GOOD.” This, by the way, is complete and utter crap. Once I started looking, I found so many redundancies and extra words and useless, non-descriptive phrases that I actually felt pretty stupid that I’d never noticed it before. So far I’ve cut about 1,400 words doing this. And I’m not even done yet. It’s not going to get rid of 12,000 words, but it’s certainly going to give me a better manuscript for my efforts.
For example:
“I knew that the fact that we were going to have to get moving pretty quickly was going to weigh on his mind.”
Can be condensed to:
“We needed to get moving, and he knew it.”
So how do you actually go about doing this? For me, the process is twofold. The first (and easiest) part is to go through lists of common words that EVERYONE uses. Rachelle Gardner has a fantastic post about this very subject, and lists some words writers tend to include that may not be necessary. The important thing to remember when you’re doing this is that if you overuse, say, “eventually,” it doesn’t mean that every single instance of this word needs to be erased from the manuscript. Sometimes that’s just the word you really want. The point is to be aware of the tendency to overuse, and change the instances where it isn’t as necessary, so that you don’t have it in every other paragraph.
Don’t just blindly “replace all” and think you’re done, you still need to read each sentence carefully. Sometimes the extra word can just be deleted without affecting the sentence’s meaning, but sometimes you need to replace it with something else–and sometimes it means that the whole sentence is poorly constructed and you need to rewrite it.
Note: I personally tend to be more lenient about this in dialogue. We speak in clichés and repetitive phrases–it makes sense that our characters do too. You still don’t want every other sentence containing the same words, but in my opinion there’s a bit more room for extraneous words in dialogue than in straight prose. Just make sure any clichés or pet phrases your characters use are appropriate for them!
Part two of the process is a bit harder, because it involves learning what your own personal, unique weirdnesses are. I ended up downloading a trial version of a program called Cliché Cleaner that comes stocked with several thousand clichés, which I found less helpful, but it also scans your document for repetitious phrases. Which is unbelievably helpful.
I found the program helpful as a jumping off point–once I started finding a few phrases and words that I overuse, the rest really began to jump out at me. For example, everyone is always glancing over their shoulders in my book. And okay, this is because most of the time they’re being chased by monsters, but when I did a search for “shoulder” I found it on practically every page. Which is excessive no matter what the circumstances.
I’ll leave you with a list of my own commonly used phrases–just in case they show up a lot in your writing as well!
just
even
in the dark[ness]
now and then
here and there
the fact that
of course
last thing I wanted to do
[shifting weight] from one foot to the other
for a [brief] moment
rooted to [the spot/the chair/the ground]
[wanted] nothing more [than to]
sort of
kind of
[over my/his/her] shoulder
part of my mind
different from
What are some of YOUR overused words and phrases? I’d love to hear some of them!
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I use ‘the fact that’ a lot too, and I only just realised that the word ‘awkward’ (or ‘awkwardly’) crops up on almost every page. My characters also do a lot of sighing, biting their lips, looking away in shame and shrugging carelessly. My first draft isn’t so pretty.
Yeah, first drafts never are. Despite what I used to think!
Ooh, my characters do the biting their lips thing too! For some reason not as much in TIW, but in other books they do it ALL the time. I’ll have to add it to my list!
“Therefore” is my worst one (science writing). I don’t even try to stop it on the first draft, but draft 1.1 always involves searching though and replacing/removing instances of it.
The fantasy author I most strongly associate the character-behavior-description-overuse phenomenon with is definitely Robert Jordan. It’s especially bad because his female characters suffer from it far more than the male ones. They constantly pull on their braids, sniff, and cross their arms under their breasts. All of them. All the time. ~D:
When your characters do have unique habits (other than those inherent to their gender, of course), do you try to describe their indulgence in those behaviors using different phrasings?
Yeah, I admit I don’t pay much attention to my common words on the first draft either. The need to get the story down definitely overrides that.
Man, yet another reason I’m probably not going to read Robert Jordan. The list just keeps getting longer! Although, the characters in the David Eddings books all have character-specific tics, and I loved those books when I was a kid.
I do try to switch it up, yeah. I also try to actually limit the times they do those habits, too. I pick the times they’ll have the most impact. If a character swears all the livelong day, it’s best to only write it out when said swearing is actually going to impact the other characters/situation, otherwise you start to just ignore it as a reader.
Man, where do I start? ‘Quite’ is a repeat offender for me, and my characters spend a lot of time shifting their weight from one foot to another. I’m not sure whether I infected you with that tic, or vice versa.
It’s been incredibly educational, helping with these cuts–I’m getting at least as much out of it as you are, and perhaps more. Every time I think something can’t get shorter, it does, and it gets better. Such a valuable experience!