When Nathan Bransford offers writing or publishing advice, we listen…and advise y’all (especially prose writers) to do the same. Here’s the latest reason why.
by Nathan Bransford
When novels are bloated with an excessive word count, the extra words are often where you’d least expect them.
In fact, when I’m editing, I often find that very long novels are among the most tightly plotted. The authors know the word count is a problem, so they trim all the extra scenes and streamline the storytelling.
So how do these novels still end up way too long?
It’s almost always at the sentence and the paragraph level. When nearly every sentence has a few unnecessary words and nearly every paragraph has a sentence or two that’s already apparent from context, it really, really adds up. Over the course of a novel these small, seemingly innocuous redundancies can mean tens of thousands of extra words.
I’ve talked about a few different ways of paring back your word count, but today I want to hone in on one pratfall in particular: over-explaining default objects and gestures.
When to let the default suffice
Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we all have roughly standard ideas of everyday objects and gestures….