Ten text-trimming tips

When I'm drastically over the word count, I bring in re-enforcements. Often another person – fresh to the work and unsentimental – can spot the nonessential bits. Check out this piece, entitled Murder Your Darlings.

A technique I find useful is to outline the essay retroactively. I write down a short phrase that summarizes each paragraph, then one word stating its dominant emotion. First I examine the plot and emotional arc – what journey am I taking the reader on? Do I repeat myself? Backtrack? Does the piece build to a climax and finish with some insight? Sometimes I copy the summaries onto scraps of paper and shuffle them around on the desk or floor. Thinking in another dimension can help.

A few other tricks to try:

1. Make all verbs active ("the clown threw the pie," rather than ;"the pie was thrown by the clown)".
2. Trade helping verbs and gerunds (was quacking) for simple tenses (quacked).
3. Eliminate unnecessary prepositional phrases. Do we need to know that the cat curled on a blanket near the window in the living room under a sunbeam? Or just that Whiskers basked in a sunbeam? Be alert to those that repeat the obvious (in the film, on the website, in the country where you are traveling, etc).
4. Use the possessive, rather than "of" clauses. For example: "The evil editor of Knitwear Monthly suffers red-pen fever" (9 words) becomes "Knitwear Monthly's evil editor suffers red-pen fever" (7 words).
5. Replace adverbs with more precise verbs.
6. Ditto adjectives: soup up your nouns instead.
7. Ruthlessly root out word and phrase repetition. Often reading the piece aloud (or backward) helps spot terms you've echoed again and again, sometimes to no affect.
8. "Actually" and "literally" sprinkle our conversations, but rarely need airing in print. Ax 'em. Also cut adjectives that intensify, rather than modify (like just, certainly, entirely, extremely, completely and exactly).
9. Avoid sentences anchored by pronouns and verbs of being. For example, "it was Mr Portly in the foyer with a bullwhip who murdered her" (13 words) becomes "Mr Portly bullwhipped her to death in the foyer" (9 words). Readers respond better to characters in action, anyway.
10. Trim restatements (a sultry, sexy fandango).