Writer Wednesday – Top 5 Tips for Lowering Your Word Count

As someone who is routinely over word count for submission, I thought it would be helpful to share my Top 5 tips on how I tackle this problem. I mean, I’ve done it often enough that I should be considered an expert, right? Joking. But, I have done this A LOT.

TIP 1: Read It!

Read the book on your Kindle *AND* as a line-edit on your laptop. I never used to do step two of this, but I started in 2023 and the difference was incredible.

I know this sounds obvious, but as an author/write, you’re too close to your own story. I’ve always found that reading on a Kindle or e-reader gives you a different setting, a different layout, and a “reader” perspective, so you tend to notice things that you might not normally. This effect is TWO-FOLD when you do a line-by-line edit on your laptop. Now, this was a trick I was missing before, because I always find editing on my laptop to be distracting. I worry that I’m going to over-edit, but it actually does work and it saves you time.

For the kindle/e-reader read through, it’s simple :

• convert your finished file into EPUB with Calibre, and send to your kindle/e-reader via e-mail or USB
• read the book, using bookmarks, notes and highlights to mark any changes you want to make along the way
• then open the file on your computer and type up the changes.

You’ll be surprised how many MORE changes you spot, as you’re typing up the ones you’ve already marked.

Then you start at the beginning of the document and read it word for word, line by line. The wider screen, different formatting, and the ease of having your full keyboard on hand will offer a different view of your book entirely. Plus, you have the bonus of making changes AS you are reading. The other bonus is that you can constantly check your word count, if you want to. (which I usually do)

I actually find it helpful to have a second document open, with various notes on character descriptions, word count and such. Then I can mark off what the word count was before I started, what it was after the e-reader changes, and what the difference is after the line edits. This lets you have a quick view of how the two processes differ and the way each one alters your word count.

Tip 2: Make a List

Okay, so technically this is a sub-set to Tip 1, but it’s probably the MOST useful list you will ever make for your future edits. Let’s start with your Regular list. (I have a Regular and Priority list, which we’ll visit later)

NOTE: if you want to take a peek at my list, you can see the full version here.

As you are reading your book on e-reader or on your laptop, keep a notebook at your side. Whenever you come across a word or phrase that you feel you’re constantly marking for edits – say, “such as” or “was going to” – write that onto your notebook. By the time you’re done, I guarantee you’ll have at least a dozen – if not twice as many! – words or phrases that have become your habitual fillers. Everyone has fillers that naturally seep into their writing, so it’s always a good idea to find yours and mark them for immediate elimination.

I’m sorry to say that, as the years have gone on since I began doing this, my list grows with every book I edit. It now has 512 words/phrases on the list. However, some of these are repeats, for a simple reason.

I include character names. I have a terrible habit of using a character’s name more often than I need to, so I choose 4-5 of the most mentioned characters in the book and mark them down for potential deletion:

• , [name].
• “[Name]
• , [name],
• , [name]?

I use this for ALL of the 4-5 names, and you’d be surprised how many you can get rid of. I might also do a sweep of just , [name] with no full stop, comma or question mark, for those tricks semi-colons or exclamation points that may have slipped in, just to make sure I get them all. I also take into account whether a word is likely to appear in Caps or small case, if there are different permutations of a word, for example:

• tried to
• try to
• trying to
• turn to
• turned to
• turning to

I find it’s better to cover all the bases and check every tense of a word, just in case. If there’s a word that I notoriously over-use but is sometimes relevant, I might mark it with a specific format on my list, eg:

• , again.
• again,
• again.
• , too
• too,
• too.

Also, don’t underestimate the impact that “expression” words have on your word count. For example, you’d be amazed how often these words pop up and how many words you can save from your word count by deleting things like :

• frowned
• smirked
• chuckled
• smiled
• nodded
• blinked
• swallowed
• scowled
• pouted

The beauty of eliminating these words is that you’re often killing two birds with one stone – most are preceded by or followed by ‘and’. I find that I sometimes start or finish a sentence with “and smirked.” or “and nodded.” That’s TWO words in ONE search, and often more, because you’ll find that rewriting the start of that sentence to eliminate the ending expression will save you at least one more word if not two. Now, if you have 25 (or in my case, sometimes, 120) instances of “and smiled” then you can see that you’ll instantly delete *at least* 50 words just by searching for this ONE word on your list.

Even if I know that by searching the word on its own, with match case and “exact word” ticked in my search option, I’ll come across them anyway, sometimes I just want to target the specific format I’m looking for. This is especially important if it’s a word that can give a character context or personality, within their dialogue and might be very prevalent in your work.

Tip 3: Use your list!

I know it sounds obvious, but if you USE the list you’ve just created, you’ll be amazed at how many small, seemingly insignificant words you can cut from your word count. It takes me roughly a week to do an intense edit of a novel – a month, if it hasn’t been looked at in a while and might need rewrites – and with every day that I work on my Priority word list and my Regular word list – I can delete up to a 1,000 words a day.

Now, the MOST effective use of this list is across *multiple* books. With every book you edit, you’ll find more words to add to your list, because different genres, characters and situations will offer different variations on word use.

NOTE: Your list will NEVER be complete, as long as you keep writing new material. The whole point of this list is that recognising your problematic filler words will eventually become second nature.

Tip 4: Find your Priority!

So, while you’ve been utilising your list for Tip 3, I bet you found some words weren’t cropping up as often as you thought, and some were a bigger problem than you realised.

This is where you create your Priority list. This Priority list will soon become the back-bone of your future edits, to the point where you might not even need to touch your extensive Regular list, unless you’re still massively over word count. As I have been, once or twice.

Your Priority list is made up of all the little nuances that crop up most in your work, across the board. So, this is where you keep your specific comma phrases, your multi-faceted words (try, tried, trying) and your character names. This is also where you keep the things that keep cropping up that really aren’t needed. For example, these are my biggest offenders, across ALL my books:

• and sighed
• and sighing
• and smiled
• and smiling
• sighed and
• sighing and
• smiled and
• smiling and

*sigh* You see what I mean? It’s ridiculous, and most of the time when I read the sentence back where this phrase cropped up, it’s obvious they’re happy or exasperated or tired, or it’s completely unnecessary. 90% of the time, I can straight-up delete these.

Tip 5: READ THE BOOK!

I cannot stress hard enough how important it is that after ANY edit – major or minor – you READ THE BOOK again! This is important, because people make mistakes. You may have done a Replace All just to see how many times a word was used throughout your document (as I have done, in the past) only to later read the book and discover that you replaced all “that” with “then” or that you made a spelling mistake when changing your character’s name from Tim to Jonathan and you now have a thousand Tonathan’s in your book.

Plus, I cannot emphasis how many MORE edits you will make, after getting your book to this stage, especially if your goal is to lower your word count.

For reference, I went through this ENTIRE list when getting For an Omega book 1: Lucky ready to submission. I had a 200k document that I needed to get down to 100k, before I could submit, so I deleted LITERAL chapters and paragraphs, to get this baby down to 112k. That was as far as I could take it with my lists, so I uploaded it to my e-reader for another read, hoping there might be references to events I’d deleted, or silly things I could delete.

I discovered that at some point during my mass edits, I had edited out the flow of the first 90 pages.

I was gutted. Devastated. But, I could also see the potential of how to fix it, and got to work. I spend 2-3 days rewriting those 90 pages into 70 pages, reinserted some older scenes that I’d removed, and began this process all over again. Then I had a clean copy to upload to my e-reader, with a new timeline, new scenes, and a reshuffle of older scenes that meant I could effectively be reading the book for the first time.

I took that 112k down to just 103k.

~

IN CONCLUSION

The whole point of this is to show how easily small deletions can make a huge impact. For example, once I’d completed the mass cuts of chapters and paragraphs and re-writes of Lucky, I had a document that was 116 k words. That was still 16 k over word count for submission, but within a week of meticulously chasing down ALL the useless words on my list – and reading each sentence they appeared in, to check if they were really necessary – I got that down to 110 k overall. Now, that might not seem like much, but that’s 6 k of filler words that I cut, which not only makes your story cleaner but makes you focus on what you’re trying to say, the most economical way of saying it, and putting those extra words into the places that count.

I mean, do you really need 12 sentences that start with “So” or 8 paragraphs that begin with “By the time”?? No. Promise me, unless you’re doing something incredibly complicated with the timeline, then that’s not necessary at all. Sentences like “He smiled as he sipped his lukewarm coffee, watching events unfold” is fine if you haven’t mentioned he’d happy, got a coffee, or that he’s sitting there while all the action goes on without him already. But, odds are that you’ve already done that in a way that this ENTIRE sentence isn’t needed.

And just to prove my point, let’s take my conclusion and apply these tips on brevity and necessity:

The whole point of this is to show how easily small deletions can make a huge impact. For example, once I’d completed the mass cuts of chapters and paragraphs and re-writes of Lucky, I had a document that was 116 k words. That was still: 16 k over word count for submission, but within a week of meticulously chasing down ALL the useless words on my list – and reading each sentence they appeared in, to check if they were really necessary – I got that down to 110 k overall. Now, that might not seem like much, but that’s: 6 k of filler words that I cut, which not only makes your story cleaner but makes you focus on what you’re trying to say, the most economical way of saying it, and putting those extra words into the places that count.

I mean, do you really need 12 sentences that start with “So” or 8 paragraphs that begin with “By the time”?? No. Promise me, unless you’re doing something incredibly complicated with the timeline, then that’s not necessary at all. Sentences like “He smiled as he sipped his lukewarm coffee, watching events unfold” is fine if you haven’t mentioned he’d happy, got a coffee, or that he’s sitting there while all the action goes on without him already. But, odds are that are pointless. you’ve already done that in a way that this ENTIRE sentence isn’t needed.

See how many unnecessary filler words are in there? The original conclusion is 236 words, while the fixed conclusion is only 91. Now, on my blog I don’t care how many words I use and I’d rather write like I talk, but when I’m writing a novel, I want it to be clean and concise, to say what needs said and not be bogged down by all the extra stuff that just takes up space.

If you try this process, PLEASE let me know if it works for you. And if you have other tips, share them! I’m always up for trying new things.