The Priority Edit

If you think I’m just going to sweep in here and blog again as if several years haven’t gone by…you’re exactly right. Let’s get to it.

(What’s been happening?  I’ve been doing a lot of editing with my head in Word files rather than WordPress. Also living my life, volunteering, spending time with loved ones, taking a few cross-country trips, getting through one bout of COVID that could have been way worse—hurray, modern medicine!—far more watching the news unfold in horror than I’d like, and starting to lift weights in addition to hardcovers. Thanks for asking.)

First, a writing exercise

You don’t have to do this—I’m not going to pop up behind you to enforce it—but I promise, it’s more fun if you do. If you don’t feel like it right now, maybe you’ll be convinced to try by the end of this blog post.

Pick a scene that’s been causing you trouble. Or a short story. Or pick a scene you feel really good about. Or take the first 3 to 5 pages of your novel.

You want a selection not much under 1,000 words but not much over 2,000.

Copy and paste it into a new file. Make a note of the exact wordcount.

Because your mission is to reduce it by 10%.

If you feel ambitious, try 20%.

I’ve done this for up to 40%.

And that’s your only mission.

Remember, this is a new file. You’re keeping the old version. You can always restore what you cut. In fact, after that 40% cutting exercise (I was under editorial orders), I used Microsoft Word’s Compare > Combine function to see how the new version differed from the old one. I reversed the cuts that I regretted. My preferred version was still about 25% shorter than the beginning draft.

Concision is educational.

Why go short?

Some of you don’t need an answer to this question. You’re always writing longer than you want to or than you’re told you should. Many short story markets don’t want to see more than 5,000 words (maybe 7,000 if you’re lucky and brilliant). Blog readers often want posts shorter than 1,000 words (uh-oh…). Attention spans are short. Time is precious.

But some of you feel like you’re never writing enough. And all of you sweated for each of those words. Writing is hard work. It can feel tragic to undo, to make less of it.

Except, remember: all writing is rewriting. The power of a story isn’t just a function of how many words it has. And sometimes, more is less.

Most importantly, you want to make sure you mean each word you write. Resolving to cut any word you can is the best test of whether you really mean it.

Keep in mind: when readers enjoy a long story, it’s because they’re getting a lot of ideas, a lot of emotion, a lot of story. When readers feel a story is too short, that’s often because it didn’t have enough of what they wanted, whether action, or worldbuilding details, or witty dialogue, or steamy kissing, or insight into a character’s thinking. Make sure you’re giving your readers those gifts. Even a story that’s intended to be long and leisurely still benefits from a concision edit to ensure you’re providing lots of experience, not just lots of words.

So, what did you cut?

First off, I bet you cut a lot of repetition.

Jenna ran swiftly isn’t going to survive this kind of edit.

You’re not going to keep two mentions of Michael’s beautiful brown eyes when one will do.

You’re also going to remove throat-clearing and vagueness. You’ll remove many uses of “just” and “that.” You’ll remove filtering words—I could feel my blood run cold becomes My blood ran cold.

James W. Ziskin (in How to Write a Mystery: A Handbook from Mystery Writers of America) advises: “make it memorable or make it economical” and “challenge every sentence, every noun, every verb, every adjective, and every adverb.” I’d only add pronouns and especially conjunctions–the wrong “and” or “but” or “or” will make your sentence twice as long as it needs to be.

As you go over the story a second time, because you still haven’t cut down to your target wordcount, you’ll look at details that might be digressions. Now, I don’t believe in only keeping words that directly serve the plot. A touch of setting description, an entertaining line of dialogue from a minor character, and an emotional or funny moment between your protagonists all make the story richer. But a severe edit for concision forces you to figure out what the goal of your story is, and what goal each sentence in it serves. You’ll find out where the gap gets too wide—where a sentence is doing something your readers just don’t need. You may find there are so many digressions, so much unnecessary detail, that readers might get confused about story’s intentions. For example, if you describe a room down to the carpet tacks and up to the ceiling, we’ll expect pivotal events to happen in that room. (But let’s be honest: even when pivotal events happen, readers rarely need to know what the carpet tacks look like.) 

You can always save these cut sentences, details, and phrases in a different word file. Someday you might use them in another story. Even if you don’t, the fact that you can save them makes removing them from this piece of writing a lot easier.

You’ll also, inevitably, find loose ends—setup for a plot development you decided not to go with, a bit too much attention lavished on a side character (maybe they deserve a story of their own), a few paragraphs where you were spinning your wheels and wrote dialogue about the weather for the sake of writing something.  Oh, and repetition. Have I mentioned repetition?

This exercise might also lead you to write future stories differently. Once you realize how much of your characters’ body language you cut (you need some, but not on every line of dialogue), you might write less of it in the future. Or you might write the same amount, planning a concision edit down the line to take out what you don’t need. Whatever works. 

Beginners in literature are inclined to fumble with a handful of adjectives round the outline of what they want to describe: but by 1924 I had learnt my first lessons in writing, and was often able to combine two or three of my 1921 phrases into one.

-T.E. Lawrence, in the preface to his autobiography Seven Pillars of Wisdom
(which I happened to be reading the day I edited and shared this post)

If you only have time for one edit, make it for concision

This is why I titled this post “The Priority Edit.” Ideally, you’d have time for numerous drafts—from developmental to line editing to proofreading, and perhaps multiple stages of each. But with the pace of modern writing and publishing and blogging and life in general, you might not.

You still want to keep your eyes out for typos and grammar errors. Since you’ll be paying close attention to every sentence, this happens naturally. Editing for concision often invites you to consider and re-consider the grammar of each sentence. You can often make a sentence shorter by changing its grammar. (Don’t go overboard on sentence fragments, though. They have their place. Not everywhere. Without verbs, sometimes confusion.)

When you’re making your story shorter by 10% or 20% or 40%, you ask “What am I trying to say?” with every word. It makes you prioritize. It makes you clarify.

How do I want the reader to experience this story? Does this word add to the experience? If not, what is it doing?

There’s a second reason I call this “the priority edit”: answering these questions reveals your priorities. If you won’t cut something, if your heart refuses, that’s valuable information. It can help you frame and emphasize those truly important elements of your story.

Also, I’ll say it again—because I have a sense of irony—a closely attentive edit with the goal of concision is the surest way I know of to catch repetition when self-editing.  When you’re making each nod and smile justify itself, you notice when someone nods three times in a row.

Flexibility

On an early draft, your only goal is to get ideas into sentences. Often you haven’t picked the best way to convey the idea (in an early draft, the best way is any way that gets it down). When, in revising, you try to get the same information across in fewer words, you’ll test several different phrasings. Should this be its own sentence, or could it be condensed into one adjective in the previous sentence? Should this be said in dialogue or observed in descriptive narration? Whatever version you go with—even a long, lush version—you’ll do better for knowing you had other options.

We can’t multitask

I wish we could. I’ve tried for years. But at best, we switch between different tasks rapidly, and science shows this worsens our performance.

That’s why “Don’t edit as you write” is common advice. It doesn’t universally apply: many writers find that rereading what they’ve already written, and cleaning it up a bit, refreshes their understanding of the story and gives them ideas to continue with. But even there, it’s a shift between making decisions about already-written words to writing new ones. You do have to decide what new words to put on the page. You want to decide well. But you shouldn’t—can’t—be as critical of the newborn words as you are when you’re editing ones that have had time to ripen.

Honestly? You can’t even edit as you edit. Editing tackles so many things—if a character arc develops convincingly, if a plot rises to an exciting climax, if a scene has a pace that holds the reader’s attention, if a character’s hair suddenly changes length or their name gets spelled differently. You can’t do all of this at once. But neither is it physically or mentally possible to go over the same page a hundred times to address a hundred different aspects of the writing craft.

“Can I tell the story without this paragraph, this sentence, this word?” is a question that tackles many elements at once. Pacing, clarity, characterization. Emotion and sensory vividness. Dramatization vs implication (what happens directly on the page, and what can or should the reader assume is going on unspoken?).

Other ways to ask  “Can this be cut?”

Maybe “cut” sounds too bloody. Here are other ways to look at it:

Does this need to be said? Will the plot advance just fine without it? Does knowing this information add to the reader’s experience ? Does it add enough to be worth the reader’s time? Could it be inferred from characters’ actions and attitudes rather than stated outright? Could it be left open-ended, so readers might infer something even more interesting?

As Stephen King says in Danse Macabre (an excellent guide to horror, but applicable well beyond that genre), so long as we don’t see the monster, our imaginations will come up with scarier what-ifs than any writer can produce. When it’s finally revealed, a part of us goes, “Thank goodness it’s only a 10-foot-tall monster, and not a hundred feet tall like it could have been!” Sometimes the unnamed or hinted-at is more powerful than any information you can give. It’s certainly more concise.

Going longer

Yes, it’s possible that after asking “Do I want this? Do I need this? Do I mean this?” you’ll add words in some places. Maybe a sentence is necessary but also insufficient. You need a full paragraph to convey the important information.

But how efficient can you make that paragraph? What’s the most impactful way you can convey an idea to readers?

Those are useful considerations even when your readers enjoy your verbosity. Make sure you’re saying a lot at length, not just a little.

A closing quote and a mystery

I read a lot of books on writing and editing, for obvious reasons. When I come across an excellent piece of advice or a clarifying quote, I write it down. Unfortunately, somehow I lost track of who the following quote is from. I doubt it’s mine! But it expresses the ideas of this post so excellently and concisely that I want to share it:

One you’ve figured out what you like [by reading and noticing your responses], take a look at what’s left: Is it really needed? Does it add? (It may not be needed, yet add nonetheless.) Should it be shorter? Longer? This simple process can be surprisingly effective, because what interests you the most is, very often, what’s going to be of the most interest to your readers. If you feel uncomfortable with the length of a passage, the amount of detail, or the number of observations made by a character, then your reader’s reaction is likely to be at least as negative as yours. 

Be forewarned: Don’t ruthlessly delete everything that doesn’t advance your plot. That would result in a novel with no texture.

I thought this might be from Renni Browne and Dave King’s Self-Editing for Fiction Writers—which I highly recommend—or from Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World, the most exciting book on writing and being read that I’ve encountered in years. But I can’t find it in either of them. Nor in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird or Ursula K LeGuin’s Steering the Craft. So while I review my list of books I’ve read (I’ve been keeping one since 2016, but it’s a very long list), I’m wondering if maybe you, reader, will recognize these words and let us know their writer in a comment?

In the meantime, I recommend taking their advice!