“The word count is too long.”

“The word count is too long.”

And a small part of my heart shriveled up and died.

Of course I had known that 160,000 words was too long. But…

So began the soul-searching, heart-wrenching, make-me-wish-I-actually-knew-what-I-was-doing-when-I-started-this process of cutting out at least 40,000 if not 60,000 words from my novel.

And somehow…I did it. Hacked it to pieces. Read and re-read and changed so many things that I have trouble recognizing it as the same story I started writing almost 6 years ago.

And yet…

In the process, I realized things like, “Yeah, that is unnecessarily wordy,” or, “You know, that character wouldn’t really respond that way,” or, “That’s cliché and boring,” or, “This scene does nothing to move the story forward.”

I also found words and phrases that I apparently really like and used way too many times without even realizing. For example, people tend to do a lot of “storming out” of rooms. But no longer! Now, we’re confrontational, we stay and fight it out, and we like it. Well…some of us don’t like it. But that just adds to the conflict, which makes things more fun. Win win.

It’s interesting to see how the writer I was 6 years ago has evolved. If I had started this story today, it wouldn’t be the same story at all. Some of the things I wrote years ago are things that I would never write today.

Now, I’m in the process of revising one last (ha ha) time before I start submitting to literary agents.

With a little luck and a whole lot of hope, we might just be the proud parents of a bouncing baby book one day.

ki eezane