Word Count and Editing: Cuts Like A Knife

The idea of cutting thousands of words from your precious baby (novel) is terrifying. Here's how my agent helped cut 11k from mine without changing much of anything.

Word count. Just how important is it?

This is a subject that is widely debated in the writing community. Some say, as long as the book is compelling and keeps us reading, it doesn’t matter if it’s a little long. Others say, there are so many reasons out there for an agent or an editor to reject your manuscript—why give them yet another reason, such as, too many words?

If you’re an aspiring or published author, you’ve likely been hammered over the head constantly with the phrase, “this industry is so subjective.” Well, it’s true. As someone who’s been on sub and got multiple offers for my forthcoming debut novel, THE BETTER MOTHER (Spring ‘26), I finally feel like a have even a teensy bit of understanding of this concept.

What one editor hates and tears down, another editor could fall head over heels for, and try to snatch up immediately. And the number of rejections you’ve received can mean nothing—literally nothing. Even you have double digits of rejections from editors in your pocket (or even triple digits from agents), your “yes” could still be the very next email to pop into your inbox. That’s what happened to me, and to tons of other authors I know—with no warning or even a hint that it was coming.

A bit about word count

Guides may vary a little, but for an adult novel (I can’t speak to children’s, MG, YA, etc.) most professionals will tell you 80,000-90,000 words is the sweet spot for an unknown author.

Why? I’ve been given countless reasons: the cost of paper and ink (a longer book means more of both of these), the current generation’s short attention span, or the fact that publishers don’t want to spend as much on a debut as they would a tried-and-true bestseller.

And here I was, in the Fall of 2023, with a first draft of an adult thriller that I was incredibly proud of, that clocked in at 122,000 WORDS.

Yikes.

Where to even begin??

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that my zero draft was that long. After all, I used what I call “the spaghetti method” of drafting my first novel.

WTF is ‘the spaghetti method?’

Yes, she did. I call it “the spaghetti method” because of that phrase we’ve all probably heard: “Just throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, and see what sticks.”

In other words, don’t self-edit. If a thought or an idea comes to you, write it! Will it end up in the final, or even the second, draft? Maybe. We’ve got to see if it will stick. But don’t think about that right now—just keep writing.

It’s all a numbers game—or rather, a number-of-words game. Not everything will make the (painful) cut, but the more you write, the more you have to work with. While writing my zero draft, I literally wrote anything and everything about my characters, their stakes, and the events in their lives, that came to me. No kidding—I had a whole page where my main character debates with herself on whether or not to get a dog. Whether she did, or whether she didn’t, did her having or not having a dog have anything to do with the stakes or the plot at large? Nope. Not a damn thing. So no, that spaghetti did not stick, and it was one of the first noodles to fall when it came time to edit.

It’s kind of like that exercise of writing out backstories for our characters before we start writing. Some of us like to get deep, like really deep, into our characters’ lives, even writing out tiny little things that happened to them as babies, and probably have nothing to do with the slice of life that the novel focuses on. But it still helps. Knowing your characters so deeply only helps you when writing your novel—knowing how they’ll react to something that happens to them, and why they react that way to it that way, even if it seems counterintuitive to a reader. It may not end up in the book, but it helps the writing process.

The hardest part is determining which of these spaghetti noodles is key to the story, and which you can afford to let fall off the wall. And that’s hard. So hard. This is your precious baby! I liken it to trying to decide whether to get a baby’s hair cut for the first time. While you know it’s practical—how many times have you had to wash strained squash out of your little one’s hair now??—still, the thought of cutting your baby’s adorable curls is heart wrenching.

This is where alpha or beta readers can be helpful. Of course each and every scene, and every word in it, feels ultra-essential to you. You wrote it. You bled it. But if you want to be a published author, you have to be okay with letting some things go.

I utilized several beta readers for THE BETTER MOTHER - some were just eager readers (which are helpful! Your target audience!), and some that are writers/editors themselves, including a couple beta-swaps (you read mine and offer feedback, and I’ll do yours). Through my own editing, and then incorporating feedback from such people, I managed to get my own word count down from 122,000 to 107,000, which astounded me. What an achievement! But it still wasn’t enough.

Now, I’m very, very lucky to have what’s called an “editorial agent.” In other words, an agent that is experienced in writing and editing and will help you through the process of structural and/or line edits—the amazing author, agent, and human Jenna Satterthwaite (check out her AMAZING Substack!). After I accepted Jenna’s offer of representation, I was THRILLED when she told me that she didn’t think my manuscript needed much in the way of edits. Structurally, she said it was pretty solid (a point I only reached after many beta readers and a couple of freelance editors helped me rework it several times). But I think we both knew my word count was high, and Jenna was also very astute at picking up on some of my bad habits (telling vs. showing, filter phrases, too many adverbs, repetitive dialogue, etc.) that can be hard for us to self-identify; if you’re like me, you read your manuscript aloud or at least in your head, and hey, it all sounds good to me! Of course it does—it’s my own words! So why cut anything?? But unless you’re writing this book for your eyes only, that’s not going to cut it (pun intended!).

For example: In my debut, there was one three-paragraph part of a scene that I thought really spoke to my villain’s motivations. My agent wanted to cut it because it was making the scene drag a bit, and because, well, word count. We talked it over, and she helped me figure out how to tighten and shorten it a bit, while still preserving its impact. And it worked! I’m so glad that (as of now, anyway) it’s still in the book, but I’m also so glad that the process helped tighten it up, so my scene felt nice and snappy.

My bad habits

Now, if my agent Jenna is reading this—don’t go thinking I’m cured, haha! I’m sure I’ll still make many of these mistakes in the draft of my next book! But either way, her line edits helped me become aware of many bad habits I have while writing. No, they don’t mean I’m a bad writer, they’re just little quirks that are easy for her to pick up on as an objective outside party. So don’t get discouraged if you discover you’re making some too! We all get better as we go!

Frequent fliers

Now, I think I’m pretty darn good at descriptive writing, especially when it comes to a character’s feelings. But don’t we all have phrases that we tend to overuse? Here are some of mine:

• Her eyes widened

• Her pulse quickened

• He/She sighed

If you couldn’t tell, I wrote a thriller. There are only so many ways to describe how a character physically reacts when they are shocked, or when they are frustrated. These three phrases appeared in my manuscript probably a BILLION times. Jenna was great at helping me find other ways to phrase that kind of reaction—or, how to show it versus telling it.

For example - okay, eyes widening shows fear or shock. What about the way it sounds on the inside? Such as, “blood hammered in her ears,” or “a lick of electricity shot up her spine.”

Showing vs. telling

This one is so hard to recognize, isn’t it?? Are you tired of hearing that over and over from agents, or fellow writers, or critics? Especially when you’re not even sure WHAT IT ACTUALLY MEANS?

Me too. That’s why my line edits with Jenna were SO. DAMN. HELPFUL.

For example, one line I had in my draft was, “He looked back nervously.”

That’s telling, not showing. You, the author, are TELLING your reader that the character is nervous. You’re not SHOWING us he’s nervous.

None of us can ever truly be in someone else’s head, and truly know exactly how they’re feeling or what they’re thinking—but we can pick up on clues. Those tiny ticks and mannerisms that give away their internal emotions.

So I changed it, and described how the character LOOKED and WHAT HE DID on the outside that made the main character/narrator BELIEVE or REALIZE he was nervous. I wrote, “He averted my eyes, and started fidgeting with the clasp on his watch.”

Do you see the difference? Me, when I get nervous, I fidget. I pump my leg under the table, or I pick at a fingernail, or I fidget with clothes or jewelry. I decided that was also the way my character would act, involuntarily, or without realizing it, when he is nervous. So I described what the character DID as a result of being nervous, instead of just telling the reader he was nervous.

(Granted, this doesn’t help with cutting word count, but it does speak to the editing process as a whole.)

Filter phrases and adverbs

HERE is where the majority of my word count got slashed, and tons of spaghetti fell off the wall.

Filter phrases - what are they? It’s hard to explain. But the best way I can think of is to say that it is the practice of adding extra words that are repetitive, and basically say the same thing you’ve already said earlier in the sentence.

For example: My debut THE BETTER MOTHER is first-person POV.

Jenna, my agent, highlighted tons of places like the one below, where the main character Savannah’s internal dialogue said, something to the effect of, “I decided to…”

Jenna pointed out that was unnecessary—obviously, whatever comes next is what she decided. You don’t have to tell the reader she decided to do it, and then that she did it. You only need to say that she did it.

So, as you can see in Tracked Changes, the phrase “I decided to just blurt it out” became “I blurted it out.”

Right there, that one sentence lost four words. Add that up over many, many sentences, scenes, pages, chapters, and it’s not hard to see how Jenna managed to cut 11,000+ words from my manuscript, without changing its feel at all.

Adverbs

I am so, so bad at this. I’m an over-explainer. So even in a sentence where I’m showing, I have the bad habit of throwing in adverbs that describe what I’m showing. But for a first draft, it’s all spaghetti. You can revise it later.

I remember at the height of Harry Potter mania, where tons of people were reviewing and critiquing the early novels in the original series. One such article was written by Stephen King. King praised her world-building and story-telling, but said (I’m paraphrasing here), that he could tell she was a young and somewhat inexperienced author because of the number of adverbs she used.

Examples:

“I grasped his hand tightly.”

“I smiled gratefully.”

“I answered loudly.”

My draft was ripe with those. All of these adverbs can also serve as examples of telling versus showing.

I know in some ways it can seem contradictory - after all, “loudly” is only one word, whereas “the volume of my voice rising” is six words. But hey—we never said this editing/word count thing would be easy, did we? Some edits serve to cut words, and some correct a bad habit like telling versus showing.

Here’s another example of cutting extraneous or filter words for word count:

Make sense? That edit removed four more words! They add up!

It takes a village to raise a book

Now, hopefully you’re not reading this and thinking, I’m now completely cured of all my bad habits, and have emerged a sparklingly clean, perfect writer. Far from it! But to quote a lyric from one of my favorite bands, Nickel Creek: “Failure isn’t forever, unless you quit wondering how to get better.”

Books are the product of so much more than just the author. There are also the alpha and beta readers, the professional critiquers, the developmental editors, the copy/line editors, the agents, and the editors. It takes a village!

Just think where I’ll be in five or ten years, with a few more novels under my belt—hopefully I’ll have a much better grasp on some of these concepts, and my future drafts won’t require quite so much line editing and word cutting! Fingers crossed!

I hope this helps any aspiring authors or those in the query trenches even a little bit! And thanks again to all the writers and Substack-ers whose blogs helped me so much when I was in that phase. We truly are a community

What I’m Reading:

I’m living in comp-land right now—as in, comps for my WIP Book #2. I just picked up “THE HATERS” by Robyn Harding because my WIP deals a lot with Internet trolls, online gossip, the cult of celebrity, and the like. Maybe it wasn’t the best subject matter to immerse myself in as I prepare for the launch of my debut? It focuses on an author whose debut novel gets review-bombed, and it seems someone has a vendetta against her. We’ll see how I feel as I get into it!

I also just finished an ARC of “SERIAL KILLER SUPPORT GROUP” by Saratoga Schafer, due out next month from Crooked Lane Books. Wow, what a dark and juicy novel! FMC Cyra’s sister was brutally murdered in a park two months before, and the police seem to have zero leads - until she discovers that something on the body leads police to think her death may follow a local serial killer’s pattern. So she takes matters into her own hands and poses as a serial killer in order to infiltrate a support group for local murderers. It’s chilling how the line between her real self and her deadly persona starts to blur, the deeper she gets in with the group. Can’t wait to see it on shelves soon!

What I’m Watching:

I just watched the movie “The Substance” over the weekend. WOW. It was so much more than I expected. I thought it would be more of a drama with societal satire, about the world’s obsession with youth and beauty. And it was—but wrapped up in a bloody horror movie! Demi Moore’s performance is powerful, but I was equally impressed with Margaret Qualley, who plays Demi’s fresher, younger counterpart. It gave me “Limitless” and “The Words” vibes. The premise is so unique, and it made me curious about other dystopian sci-fis out there. Are there any you recommend?

I also watched “Gladiator II” last night. I don’t have a lot to say about it, other than that it was very true to the original, in my opinion. Paul Mescal gives a powerful (and admittedly hot) performance as the son of Maximus, and it was truly a pleasure to see Denzel Washington in a villainous role for once! He was great. If you liked the original, I think you’ll like the sequel just as much.

Tell me what you’re watching and reading! I love to discuss!