in Editing
Cutting ten per cent without losing anything
Most drafts carry a layer of words that repeat, hedge or clear the throat. Removing it rarely costs the book anything.
Writers are often told their manuscript needs to lose a tenth of its length, whether by an editor, a word-count expectation or their own sense that the book has become slack. The request can feel like being asked to lose a limb. In practice, most drafts carry enough excess that a tenth can go without cutting a single scene.
Where the words hide
Length accumulates in predictable places. It is worth knowing them, because a targeted pass is much faster than rereading and hoping something jumps out.
Openings and endings of scenes are the first place to look. Characters arrive, greet each other and settle in before anything happens. They finish the important exchange and then say goodbye and leave. Readers can usually skip these transitions entirely. Start scenes late and end them early.
Repetition is the second. Writers often convey the same information twice: once in dialogue and again in narration, or once in a scene and again in a later character's recollection of it. They also restate emotions, showing a character's anger and then telling the reader she was angry.
Hedging is the third. Words like "slightly", "a little", "somewhat", "rather", "quite", "almost", "seemed to", "began to" and "started to" soften sentences. Some softening is precise. Much of it is reflexive. "She began to walk towards the door" is usually just "She walked to the door".
The sentence level
At sentence level, many cuts come from constructions that use several words where one would do. "In order to" can often be "to". "The fact that" can often go. "There was a man who stood" can be "A man stood". "He nodded his head" is "He nodded", since there is nothing else to nod.
Filter words, discussed elsewhere in this journal, are another source: "She saw that the light was on" becomes "The light was on".
Individually, these changes are tiny. Across a whole manuscript, they add up to a surprising amount, and the prose reads more briskly for it.
The scene level
If sentence-level trimming is not enough, look at scenes. Is there a scene whose only job is to convey information that appears elsewhere? Two scenes that make the same emotional point? A subplot that never connects to the main line? These can be harder to cut because they may contain writing you like, but they are often where the real slack lies.
It helps to write one line for each scene summarising what changes in it. Scenes where nothing changes are candidates for merging or removing.
Some writers find it easier to cut when they know the material is not gone. Keep a separate file of removed passages. You will rarely go back to it, but knowing it exists makes the decision less final.
What you should not cut
Voice, texture and breathing room. A manuscript cut too hard can become breathless, with every paragraph functional and none of them alive. The aim of trimming is to remove what the reader does not need, not everything the plot does not need. Those are different lists.