Tips For Trimming?
Work on my novel is proceeding fantastically. At a chapter a week, I could well stand to finish the book by the end of the year. This year.
This is of course dependant on me continuing to lose four hours a day to commuting, refraining from doing anything on the London – Hertford East train but write and never driving to work again, but we’ll see what happens.
Chapter Four is also now finished, and work on Chapter Five has begun. This is an important hurdle because in every draft of this story so far, it is always the events of Chapter Four that have prompted a complete stop and a return to the drawing board.
The chapter basically revolves around Jolku breaking into General Druart’s mansion to steal something from his bedchamber. The first time, it seemed to be too easy and actually occurred in half of Chapter Two, which was far too short for such a key even.
The second time it was given an entire chapter and featured a conversation that hints at the overall plot of the trilogy. It was overly descriptive and when I read it out to a writer’s group, they suggested trying a different perspective or writing style – which led to me writing the book in first-person.
I’ve now finished this chapter once again, and while I’m happy(ish) with the way it progresses and am keen to push beyond this sodding point into the actual storyline, there is an issue that needs to be overcome: it’s too long. I’ve tried to keep the chapter and description as simple as possible, but it’s over 7,000 words. In fact, there’s a bit of a length problem in general.
Through the various writing podcasts I listen to, I gather that no agent will look at a novel longer than 100,000 words. I’m currently on Chapter 5 of 31 and I’ve exceeded 25,000 already.
Has anyone got any tips on how I can trim things down as I go? I’ve already got to trim down Chapter One, and there’s an entire chunk I could probably cut out of Chapter Two, but beyond that, I’m stuck.
Has anyone else had this problem? Should I worry about it now, and try and cut down or hold back as I progress? Or shall I ignore the word count and deal with the length when I edit?
(see, even this post is too long!)
Well, I had to greatly trim my last story, Corruption, which was looking to be pages and pages, but was cut back to just about 5 or so, in fact, I improvised most of what I was writing because my original idea would take months to write. Anyway, maybe a page limit per chapter would help? Writer’s groups is a good idea, or a friend to read through it and highlight literally the parts which need to be improved, parts which are good, and parts which should be removed completely. There’s no way you can split the book up, into TTGFSaTH part a?
Seriously though, perhaps removing some of the content and seeing how different chapters could be like if the reader didn’t know a piece of vital information which you could reveal later on. Err, actually that’s a pretty bad idea, and it’s no help to you and your trimming problem. Umm, the best idea I could recommend would be to edit each chapter after you’ve finished it using the highlight thingy I said. Sorry I’m not much of a help :S
Cheers, Phoenix. I’ve already cut TTGFSaTH down as much as I can in terms of storyline/chapter number, so it’ll have to be chapter content. I’m going to go back and edit chapters after I’ve finished the draft - I like your idea of putting off information reveals until later, but i’ve already spaced them out too much.
We’ll see what happens.