Trying to cut a 7,300-word story to submit to a publication with an upper limit of 6,000.
After much sweating and culling, I've cut over a thousand words, but it's still not enough. I'm worried though that more cuts will erode the character's voice and the extra stuff that turns a plot into a story. It's now in that very delicate territory where some sentences are not strictly necessary, but each of them ads to the mood and the experience you want the reader to have. Because that's what stories are--experiences, rather than just lists of events or character traits. Not even lists of emotions. It's the whole package, carefully structured, with the "redundancies" as necessary as windows in a cathedral.
Still, another 250 words need to be cut. I hope I still have a story when that's done.
After much sweating and culling, I've cut over a thousand words, but it's still not enough. I'm worried though that more cuts will erode the character's voice and the extra stuff that turns a plot into a story. It's now in that very delicate territory where some sentences are not strictly necessary, but each of them ads to the mood and the experience you want the reader to have. Because that's what stories are--experiences, rather than just lists of events or character traits. Not even lists of emotions. It's the whole package, carefully structured, with the "redundancies" as necessary as windows in a cathedral.
Still, another 250 words need to be cut. I hope I still have a story when that's done.
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