4000 words, gone.

[Joe270]

In my latest rewrite, I took to heart the 'tags' bit and the 'said' advice. I chopped like the dickens. Dialogue does flow better. I still have a few of the yelled, screamed, cried out, bellowed in there, and a few, very few, adverbs.

But, hey, it's a thriller set during a hurricane on a drilling rig, wouldn't characters raise their voices now and then?

All the same, I chucked some 4k words. Amazing.

I did some other cutting, yes. But not a whole lot. The focus was dialogue.

Only two trouble spots still exist now.

[seun]

It's amazing what can be cut with just a bit of effort. I rewrote one of my books, changed quite a bit and got it down to 90,000 from 120,000.

[ccarver30]

*blinks*
If I cut 4,000 - WOW - I would be in serious trouble. I need to try to make mine longer! LOL (almost 55,000 words now)
Good job though!! :)

[stormie]

Oh, gosh, Joe--at first when I read the title to this thread I thought you lost 4,000 words of your writing. <Whew> Of which then I would have lectured you (nicely, of course!) about backing up your work on a cd, a thumb drive, and emailing it to yourself.

That said, isn't it great when you can see where the cuts can be made? All those superfluous words/tags. Gone. Well done!

[CaroGirl]

I had the same thought as stormie. But I was glad to hear that you lost words on purpose. I'll bet your tightening makes the prose flow even better. Well done!

[sunna]

Same thought here - I actualy did lost about 7K once when my thumb drive fried and word failed to save during a restart (cosmic bad luck, there), and spent about an hour flailing and screaming, before I realized you can open a temp file in notepad. Whew!
Joe270, do you save the snipped chunks (sorry for the visual!) for possible use later? I was reading some advice the other day about having a "cut" file, because some stuff that seems awful or extraneous now might be useful later on. I have a "pieces" file, myself, which is actually just whole scenes that I write when I get stuck in the real timeline - but I have deleted more scenes and chapters in the editing process than I probably have right now in my finished novel, which is a bit scary. I'm starting a 'cut' file this week. Any thoughts on organization of said file would be welcome!

[Saundra Mitchell]

Ohhh I was afraid you'd lost them, not viciously abandoned them. Since it's the latter, congratulations! I managed to lose about a thousand words in a manuscript once when I cut out all the "and thens" and made new sentences. Tics, nasty little tics. Almost as hard to kill as their arthropod cousins!

[Just Me 2021]

Congratulations! Cutting is hard, but good in the end. At first I felt like I was cutting off my own arm or something, but now I see cutting as my friend.

[seun]

Same thought here - I actualy did lost about 7K once when my thumb drive fried and word failed to save during a restart (cosmic bad luck, there), and spent about an hour flailing and screaming, before I realized you can open a temp file in notepad.

I can beat that. I was once working on a dinosaur of a computer that crashed and died in a big way. I lost almost everything. Sadly, it was in the days before I had any idea about computers so didn't have any back-ups.

It worked out in a way; I was able to improve my writing by being forced to rewrite everything. It gave me chance to see my work with fresh eyes. And taught me backing stuff up has to be done.

[ccarver30]

I also thought they work was lost... glad it wasn't! :partyguy:

[MidnightMuse]

Yikes, I agree - the thread title made me think you'd had a crash with no backups ! Good to hear that's not the case.

It's amazing what we can cut and not miss. That's what makes editing so very vital.

And just for good measure: Always backup your files !! :D

[Mr. Funktastic]

Good job. I've had a bit of trouble with cutting words in the past, though I should work on it more, and soon. My WIP has ended up being huge. Gah!

I also thought your computer had gobbled up 4000 words. That would have sucked. This is good, though, so congrats.

[Maryn]

That's a pretty impressive cutting, and your work will be the better for it, I imagine.

Did you save both versions? I might have. I imagine a someday publisher or agent saying, "We'd like to see more active dialogue tags, and some adverbs. Pump it up a little once it gets exciting, you know?" And I will just smile.

Maryn, active fantasy life

[herdon]

I think leaving in a few descriptive tags for dialogue is good writing. It's like the exclamation point. If you use it all the time it loses meaning, but if you pull it out once every two or three or four chapters then it has power and meaning. Having someone boom something can be very effective when they are normally just saying stuff.

[Joe270]

This WIP has so much dialogue, and a key group of 15 characters, so tags are unavoidable sometimes.

But I used names within the dialogue to eliminate some tags. Cut almost all where two characters spoke. Numerous phone exchanges existed, and cutting all but two or three tags worked there.

This really opened up the pages with white space, too.

I doubt a 'cut file' would help much, since the cuts, in this case, were a bunch of "Bob retorted" crap.

Then again, I could look at this cut file to remind myself what not to do in the future.

[Joe270]

Havlen, I agree with you. I came to the conclusion I needed some tags and some descriptive tags.

I started the process with the firm idea of switching all tags to 'said', and it just didn't play. Sometimes the tags are the most efficient way to covey the mood or tone of voice.

But I had way too many.

[Prawn]

I spent the week-end tightening up my first 50 pages, and I ended up cutting four, or about 1000 words.

[Raphee]

Good to hear that you lost them on purpose.