My Own Worst Editor

I’ve always had a wordiness problem. When other high-schoolers were lamenting 500-word essays, I was thinking “500 words? That’s just my prologue!” My college thesis was roughly 40 pages longer than necessary (and surely even my advisors didn’t make it to the end because it was a massive heap of pretentious gibberish). I may also enjoy a liberal sprinkling of superfluous adjectives.

Yet somehow, hilariously, I’ve spent the last 22 months working as a copyeditor for a daily news briefing, a task which requires tightening up text from (already alarmingly short) paragraphs. And it’s fine — it’s not like I’m not able to be succinct. In fact, I was slightly surprised to discover I’m pretty good at that element of the job: Take a paragraph, somewhere in the ballpark of 106 words, telling the key facts of a story. Check for grammatical errors and style guide compliance. Fact check. Improve the flow. Prune unnecessary words. Revise to eliminate even more words to get it down to 95. Check it all again. Move on to the next. It’s fun … if you’re a big nerd like me.

The really surprising thing, though, is that this newfound succinctness is leaking into my other writing. (And if you’re thinking “Really?” based on this rambling, I can assure you that yes, two years ago this would have been even ramblier.) One example: The epic rhyming picture book that started at an utterly unpublishable 1,719 words — the one I congratulated myself on trimming down under 1,200 a few years ago? It’s now 757.

The only problem is that now when I return to a project I spend more time pruning than writing. So I’ve decided to use this newfound talent for dismantling my previous work to take another pass at my first novel, the “practice novel.” It’s got some plot problems I’ll also need to deal with along the way, but I’m curious how much I can tighten it up. I’ve just started, but I’ve already chopped the first chapter from 2,013 words to 1,864.

It’s strange to think of writing as a subtractive process.