When Killing Your Darlings Becomes Mass Word Homicide

I made a mistake, Story Quester. A HUGE one. And I had to solve it FAST.

Let me back up. I was down to the wire on my deadline to finish a short story for a contest and I miscalculated. By a lot. Like by a thousand words a lot. 

Now cutting a few fluff words or sentences here or there is par for the course when editing a story. But a thousand? That’s the difference between repainting a few rooms in your home and ripping out a whole freakin’ floor.

But that’s how it goes sometimes, I guess. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Sometimes editing is killing your darlings. And sometimes you’re a murderer committing mass word homicide.

I did succeed in the end though. With my short story, A Ballad for the Granter of Impossible Wishes, coming in at a grand total of 4,984 words.

So what happened to those extra thousand words?
Did they get a burial at sea?
Or a Norseman-style pyre?
Or maybe a mausoleum entombment?

Nope. But I did save them for later and this is how…

4 Things To Do When You Commit Mass Word Homicide:

1) Duplicate Your File before Cutting

Before you start merrily frolicking through your story with an editing hatchet, play it safe and duplicate your file. 

If you write by the scene (like I do) or by the chapter, you should make 2 folders in Scrivener or Google Docs. Label the first “ROUGH DRAFT” and the second “REVISED DRAFT.” This will prevent you from mixing up the original files and the duplicates. Labeling the duplicate “REVISED” will also help. 

2) Have a Cut Page

Instead of deleting all the lines you cut, save them on a “CUT PAGE.” Think of it like the deleted scenes in the “SPECIAL FEATURES” section of a Blu-ray. 

You can even make it easier for yourself by separating what you remove with headings like “CHAPTER 5” or “SCENE 7.”

3) Highlighting Passages to Cut

Say you’re writing for something with a max word count like a short story contest or an anthology, and you’ve overshot the word cap. You can read through your story and highlight passages you could cut. 

This allows you to decide on what to cut after the read-through without wasting time on unnecessary editing. And will allow you to keep the most of what you’ve already written.

4) Exercises in Brevity

Similar to what was mentioned above—is finding more concise ways of conveying ideas, actions, or bits of dialog. Essentially, can you tell the same story but in fewer words? 

You see this every day without knowing it in the form of a story pitch when you flip over the cover of a book or scroll through shows on Netflix. The marketers have to pitch you a story in about 100 words or so. The only real difference is they conceal the final resolution of the story in their pitch.

Well, Story Quester, I hope my minor word count crisis solutions help you out in the future with your own story edits. Until next time, this is your friendly neighborhood storytelling Kat signing off.