HOW TO REDUCE WORD COUNT AND INCREASE THE BEAUTY OF OUR WORK
Let’s look at two ways:
#1 Dialogue:
Perhaps the single most important part of any story, yet in my editing practice, often the weakest, and
with tons of unnecessary words. Remedies are easy.
Tips to keep in mind:
I. Dialogue is NOT the same thing as real conversation. It’s a made thing. So cut words like Yeah, No,
Yes, Sure, What? Okay.
2. Dialogue’s job is to reveal character NOT to advance the plot.
3. Have each character use different syntax, vocabulary, etc.
4.Give an action, gesture or facial expression instead of “he said,” “she said.”
5. Don’t have one character repeat words of the other.
“Let’s to go to Tommy’s Bar and Grill.”
“Tommy’s Bar and Grill?”
5. Don’t show and tell at the same time.
Mario was dying for a cigarette.
“Brenda, got a cigarette? I’m dying over here!”
6. Don’t repeat the person’s name.
“Vanessa, is this your purse?” John asked.
“No, John.”
These small revisions cut many words over the course of an entire manuscript while giving a much more
exciting read.
Notice in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” dialogue does all the work. A man and woman
waiting at a train station in Madrid. Character, tension, resentment.
“They look like white elephants,” she said.
“I’ve never seen one” the man drank his beer.
“No, you wouldn’t have.”
“I might have,” the man said.
#2 The Big Picture
1.Eliminate long scene set-ups with a Table of Contents in which Chapters titles indicate time and place
in their title.
2. Chapters in the T. of C. can also be grouped into Parts. And each Part can have a very significant and
meaningful name. The name already accomplishes a lot of work.
3. Part names can also cast over your entire book a net, a holding structure, and this can come from an
entirely different field than literature. Often it comes from the story itself. Lisa K. Richter, a former client,
just published a crystalline and poetic love story Fly, My Darling and presents it in three movements,
titled “Allegro” “Adagio” and “Allegro con brio” giving the reader in only 5 words, a sense of the
emotional arc of the story. Published by She Writes Press it is really beautiful, spare, and moving.
A Final Word
So let us remember the white of the page. That it is not an absence, but a presence of something very
powerful. Let us be mindful and deliberate when we put ink onto it. Let us choose each word carefully
so that our words can enter the nobility of the white. As if, by the white, the words are chosen, like a
partner, and the result is a new dance that comes into the world for the very first time. A dance that only
you could make. Let that be our hope.
Kindly,
Mary Rakow, Ph.D.
maryrakow1@gmail.com
www.maryrakow.com
