How Many Words are Needed?
How many words can you remove from a story, and still have the same story? I had a very interesting experience with this the last few weeks. As you may or may not know, I write short stories for the Elegant Literature short story contests.
Complete side bar here, if you are at all interested in writing, or if you enjoy some very very well written short stories, then you should check them out. Here is a link to their website. They have not paid me, and if fact probably don't even know I exist. I just feel very strongly about promoting things and people who you believe are doing good things. I believe what this website / business does is good and promoting them is the least I can do to help.
Anyway, I wrote a story for their February 2023 contest. As I was writing my story I knew it was going to be too long, but I refrained from looking at the word count until I was done because I didn't want it to subconsciously influence my writing. I think I did the write thing there (get it?), and I am glad I did that. The problem is, when I was done my story was around 3600 words...it has to be between 500 and 2000 to be eligible for the contest. I was very proud of the story I wrote, I thought it was good, and I had absolutely no idea how I was going to cut it almost in half while keeping the same story. I spent a day or so thinking about it, and I almost just wrote a different story.
Finally, after much deliberation, I decided that I would only be writing one story a month for the contest, and that I had to make it work. No matter what. Want to guess what happened? After rereading and editing that story probably thirty times, I ended up with a story that is exactly 2000 words. That made me very happy considering that I feel I kept the story intact, but what I truly valued was the experience. That experience was not fun. It was difficult. I wanted to quit many times, I wanted to procrastinate, I wanted to put it off until tomorrow. I didn't though, and I learned some very valuable lessons from it.
With each revision it became harder to remove words. The first few times was easy, I cut out large chunks of the story that didn't actually propel it forward. I reworded things to make them shorter but mean the same thing, and I used contractions wherever possible. The last few revisions were the hardest since I had trimmed pretty much all the fat by that point. One thing I realized is that I tend to use a lot of filler words. I am guessing most people do. This post could probably be a quarter the length and get my point across. I now see the value in removing the unneeded filler, you end up with a very lean, efficient, dense story. You learn what needs to be in there and what the human mind automatically fills in. You don't have to label something as a champagne cork if it is shooting across a room, you can just call it a cork. We automatically assume that it came from a champagne bottle because human brains are smart (despite us often trying to prove that wrong). You don't have to say computer monitor, you can just say monitor. What else has monitors anyway? (Don't answer that...)
This experience made me realize the value of such thorough editing and really highlighted how different authors write differently. Some are very heavy on the descriptions and some are more lean, leaving your brain to fill in the gaps. I am glad to have gone through this and look forward to having to do it again. How else are you supposed to get good at a thing if they avoid the hard parts that forge the skill you are looking to attain?