Every age range, every genre, has a target word count you should aim for. It can be a pain in the butt, and there are outlier, but it’s industry standard:
Adult fiction: 80-100k
Sci-Fi & Fantasy: 90-120k
Romance: 50-100k
Crime/Mysteries/Thrillers/Horror: 70-90k
Young adult: 50-80k
But, when my finished my adult fantasy manuscript, it was 160,000 words. Aka, WAY too long for any genre. I needed to do some serious cutting. But my characters! My world! My plot! I have five POVs! It wasn’t possible!
Spoiler alert: it was possible, and my story was better for it.
After writing it, I let it sit for a couple months. That way, I could read it as an outsider (because I have the memory of a goldfish). I put it on my Kindle (you can also print it out), so I wouldn’t get stuck on line edits. Here are the major things I looked for:
- Repetitive scenes/information
- Sometimes my characters were in their HQ, discussing the plan. Then a few chapters later, they were there again. …Discussing a plan. At the time, it seemed super necessary to have these people keep meeting up, but once I read it with fresh eyes, having two similar scenes drug the story down. I combined them, which essentially cut out a whole chapter (and thousands of words). Then, of course, I had a few scenes similar to the scenario.
- Just like scenes, my characters really liked to drive points home. Again. And again. And again. But my reader needed to really understand the point I was trying to make and not forget it! Well, newsflash, the reader got the point the FIRST time I mentioned it. Readers are smart. They’ll feel more satisfaction remembering something from a few chapters back, instead of getting it slammed into their heads all the time.
- Restructuring
- After you cut repetitive scenes, this can restructure your whole MS. If you move some scenes around, and you’ll realize you can cut an entire chapter that set up a scene that’s no longer there.
- Useless scenes
- As much as we love the fluff scenes, they don’t always push the story forward. Sure, they make provide a snippet of information or character development, but if you move a line or two to another chapter, you can potentially cut out a whole scene. So, how do you know if a scene is pointless? If you like to get your hands dirty, you can physically write/type scene cards for every story. Make sure every scene has external action (it doesn’t have to be a fight scene, just a character doing something active), and then a reaction to that action. Then, the scene was to go inside the character, and give them a dilemma. Then, they have to make a decision. If your scene just has people sitting around talking about nothing, cut it.
- Filler words
- Filler words won’t cut thousands of words, but it can help get your word count down. An example of some filler words are “just”, “that”, “really” “seemed”, etc. There are SO many lists of filler words out there. Here’s one of them: https://savvyauthors.com/filler-words-to-remove-from-your-novel-by-meg-latorre/
So, after all that, I got my word count down to 110k words. My story is tighter, my characters are less meandering, and the sentences are easier to read.
If you really focus on cutting words, you can do it without losing the story. You got this!
