Editing Your Novel and Salvaging the Valuable Cuts
Novels can work their way into being too long. What do you do with the edits; throw them out? No, learn to repurpose them.
Writing a novel can be a free-flowing experience or an act of banging your head against those “writer’s block” walls we all hear about. When it’s free-flowing and the time comes for editing it down to a respectful dose of several tens of thousands of words, you have a significant decision to make: dispose or repurpose.
In “Outlining Your Book in 3 Easy Steps,” editor Shawn Coyne says:
“The average novel today is about 90,000 words. Big, epic stories get anywhere from 120,000 to 200,000 words.” But, he also mentions that “The Wizard of Oz was 40,000 words. The Old Man and the Sea was about 25 to 30,000 words, tops.”
If 90K is sufficient and 40K is okay, too, you’re in the ballpark with anything between the two. Nanowrimo, the international novel writing challenge each November, suggests that about 50K is a good piece of work. There you go, and it’s right in the middle of that recommended number of words.
But what if, like me presently, you have 120K words and you know you need, not want, to cut because your novel is too loose? Tightening up the writing…
