Micro Edit

[jomar]

I would have cut "word count and" and kept "wordiness."

But I like the concept of tightening things up.

I'm in the middle of a sci-fi short story that I'm poring over and asking myself why am I using this particular word, which is a whole different fun exercise.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Has anyone ever tried this? In general the concept is an all out effort to lower word count and 'wordiness'. You go line by line(time consuming, tedious and you need serious patience and focus) and read every sentence and eliminate every word that it can be read without and still make sense.

I follow a narrower version of this: I aim to take out words that aren't doing anything useful. Contributing to meaning is one way for a word to earn its keep, but there are others, like "that's how this character talks".

 

[jsmiam]

The first draft of everything I write is always too wordy, even a one-line email at work. So for me, I have to do this with everything I write.

I agree though, don't obsess. Shortening can be taken too far.

 

[MindsMirror]

We don't know if we are fans of the micro edit at all. There seem to be two vastly different camps on writing style. We had asked the forum a question about Writers' Vocabulary - Faulkner vs Hemingway which got some debate.

Recently we saw the movie about Thomas Wolfe Genious. We were really interested when his editor, Max Perkins, questions weather he has ruined the works he whittled down from their original form.

It may be factually true, Look Homeward Angle was over 1,100 pages. Perkins is said to have cut 66K words and an unedited version was published in 2000. O Lost. Reading some of the reviews, the split is there as well... and paraphrasing one persons comment. Do you want to read the writer or the editor?

In the end, we think it is about what the authors are trying to say. How they say it, well, that's up to them and what they are trying to achieve. If the goal is a mainstream novel, the line might be somewhere in the middle... Not too hot, not too cold, just right.
-MM

 

[sr71plt]

Has anyone ever tried this? In general the concept is an all out effort to lower word count and 'wordiness'. You go line by line(time consuming, tedious and you need serious patience and focus) and read every sentence and eliminate every word that it can be read without and still make sense.

I did this routinely with government analysis, where being succinct was high on the priority list. I do it a bit in review of fiction (taking a hard look at every use of "that" and "now," for instance), but not nearly to the extent as I did with something going into the PDF.

After review, though, my texts are always longer than the drafts. I push through the drafts to get it all done and leave some of the detail work for later.

 

[SimonDoom]

This is an interesting idea, and I may try it for one of my stories, if I have time to be so exacting. In general, I agree with the general rule (listed as rule number 14 by Mark Twain in his great essay demolishing James Fenimore Cooper) that one should "eschew surplusage." As with all rules about writing, though, it's one to abide practically, not slavishly. If everyone tried to write like Hemingway, reading would be a lot less fun.

One of the benefits of an exercise like this is that, with fewer words, one has to choose one's words more carefully. In particular, I find that if I focus on getting rid of the excess words and see what I'm left with I'm more likely to take the time to pick better verbs.

 

[CarlusMagnus]

… My motto in life is everything in moderation. …

That's an excellent motto. But you must apply it in moderation.

Some characters, both in real life and in literary life, are just long-winded. Most of us don't like those people—but that doesn't keep us from encountering them.

I do quite a bit of "micro-editing". I write in a text editor—not a word processor. After several sessions of writing, I insert some minimal HTML tags for formatting (using a script I wrote for the editor) and save a copy of my MS as an HTML file. Then I open that file in a browser and save it as a PDF—which I then open on a tablet in software (Notability on an iPad) that allows me to mark it up by hand with a stylus. I find that it goes much better that way than trying to edit on my computer screen. When I'm ready to actually make the changes, I transfer the marked-up PDF back to the computer and open it beside the editor window showing the MS.

If M$ Word will save something as a PDF, writers who use that software and have a tablet could use this technique, too. Saves paper, but has very much the same feel as working with a hard copy. Keeps the kids from picking up that hard copy, too.