You’re working hard on your manuscript, but are the words you choose pulling their weight? In a post on Writers Unboxed, Kelsey Allagood offers advice for making sure your words are working as hard as you are. “Over the last few years, I’ve come to seriously admire authors who write well-crafted, efficient sentences,” Allagood writes. “I’m thinking of sentences that aren’t necessarily simple or grammatically perfect, but rather ones in which each word seems carefully chosen to pack the biggest punch.”
The good news, Allagood says, is that you can train yourself to self-edit. Her tips include:
- Find phrases that can be shortened. “See if ‘a few feet of snow’ can become ‘hip-deep snow,'” she suggests. “You can use this strategy to speed up or slow down the reader’s momentum depending on the tone you want to convey.”
- Find nouns you can turn into verbs. For example, Allagood suggests changing “The sky was covered in a blanket of clouds” into “Clouds blanketed the sky.”
- Set an arbitrary page limit, and then edit your work down to meet it. “This is probably not something you want to do with an entire novel, but try it with a chapter or scene,” Allagood says. She uses page limit instead of word count, because that forces her to cut, rather than merely reword.
- Write some microfiction. “Try to write 100 words that tell a complete story, where a character changes between the first and hundredth word,” Allagood suggests. “This is more of an exercise than a piece of self-editing advice, but sometimes even the act of sitting down and trying to write a 100-word story seems to help my brain make the neural pathways I’m needing in my longer work.”
