Cutting for Concision

So, you’ve finished your first draft of your story. Congrats! Now you’re staring it down after having read it and notice all the problems. It’s clunky, it’s confusing, it’s got plenty of inconsistencies. It feels much bigger than your pen. You just want to dive in, delete, and rewrite everything. The next step is to edit away, right?

Yes and no. What you’re looking to do now is make your story concise. This concision process begins way before you start rewriting. Concision is all about conveying the most information in the swiftest, smoothest way possible. Focusing on concision will streamline your developmental and line editing and save you a bucketload of editing headaches. 

Creating concision in your story focuses on restructuring your story to make it easily digested by readers. Polishing it comes afterwards.

While the concision process outlined below is framed as very step-by-step, any editing process is going to be fluid and cyclical. It’s about going through multiple rounds of observation, cutting, rewriting, and adding, until you find yourself tweaking the little things over and over again. Creating concision is an inherent part of editing, but the purpose of this article is to help put you in the mindset of careful decision-making about your story. It’s up to you to weave that mindset and the concision process into your developmental and line editing.

How To Figure Out What To Cut

 Let’s cut to the chase (hehe). Thoughtfully trimming your story is one of the greatest tools to use for concision. It can be intimidating, but cutting as a way of making your story more concise will help you iron out your story in less time. This doesn’t mean ignoring your writing style or cutting out parts that make it vibrant and feel lived-in. The purpose is maintaining those aspects of your writing while cutting away the rest. Then you’ll rewrite and add. Above all else, your cuts should make you feel more confident in the way your story is structured and how it reads. 

During developmental editing, you’re looking to cut chunks as big as multiple chapters and plotlines that keep the whole story from reading as concise. The necessary parts of your story that you’re not going to touch (yet) are the parts that move character development and the plot forward, establish important world building, spend a lot of time setting up future events, and help make your story vivid. If a chunk only does one of these things, take note of that. We’ll talk about tackling those iffy parts later. 

For everything else, you can try cutting. Assuming you’re working online, create a second document next to your story for you to transfer the cut sections to. You can experiment with adding cut chunks back into your story from this document later in your developmental edits (regardless of their early draft quality—again, quality control will come with future rewrites).

Highlight (either mentally or literally) what’s keeping your plot from steadily progressing and slowing your pacing. This is why it’s so important to read over your first draft completely without making any changes—you get the big picture of your story. A secondary plot may not support your primary plot. A character might spend too much time in one area doing one thing. A chapter might read like filler. These are the kinds of blockages in your story you’re going to cut and put aside in that other doc. 

Make sure to add notes in that other document about where those cut parts came from. Notes like page numbers and chapters aren’t going to help with how much your story will change. Instead, add quick descriptions alongside your cuts regarding what happens before them and what they were meant to do. This takes time, but it will save you when you inevitably have to look through your cut parts to understand what you were writing and what you need to add back in.

If you’re still unsure of what’s acting as a story blockage, let someone you trust to give you good feedback read it. It’s even better if that person is up for taking brief notes on their thoughts while reading. Then, ask them to explain their notes and what read as boring, frustrating, or confusing. Those are your best clues into what can be completely cut and or later heavily revised later. Rewriting is in your future no matter what, so trust your future self to take care of that when the time comes.

I Made The Big Cuts! Now What?

If you have beta readers awaiting your work, you can stop here for the moment and let them read it. Beta readers shouldn’t be expecting a polished product, but you should definitely be giving them a draft you feel fundamentally good about when it comes to its structure. Afterwards, you’ll return to your developmental editing stage with the readers’ comments in mind and rework your story, likely cutting even more and taking more notes.

Next is trimming. Turn your attention to the parts you were hesitant to cut. Why were you hesitant? It was likely that there was something about them that spoke to you. But, they may have dragged, created confusion, or just didn’t fit into the rest of your story. As you read over each part, think of what it contributes, what you’d hoped it would contribute but didn’t, and what about it lags.

The “lagging” pieces within those parts you decided against cutting are what you’ll trim. Do it in a new draft so that anything you’re afraid to delete will still be in the old copy. You’re not looking to cut individual words, but look out for particularly lengthy sentences and paragraphs that just keep going. If they include important information in your story, either take a moment to distribute the information in other scenes/chapters where it makes sense, or highlight that section to be rewritten later.

Your story should read much more smoothly after these sets of edits. However, some parts may be far shorter than before and may even read as rushed. Don’t panic! You’ve kept everything you’ve cut, along with plenty of notes to keep you mentally organized as to what you’re reading and why you changed what you did. You’re going to fix those rushed parts next.

Finished Trimming. Wow, I Cut A Lot!

Great! Now, reread your story. Here, you’re going to make large tweaks. Pacing is a big focus. Does it read at the same overall pace as the rest of it, regardless of how long or short scenes and chapters are? Flag each chapter and section that reads as rushed. Your next focus won’t be cutting, but dispersing and combining what’s too short with other scenes and chapters, and then adding to the short sections/chapters you can’t disperse. 

If instead a chapter or scene still reads as too long, then your focus becomes breaking it up, shortening it, or combining chunks of it with other parts of your story. For example, maybe you’re left with a lot of important exposition. Try incorporating it into other related expository and dialogue scenes. If you can’t break it up or shorten it but it still reads as rushed, that’s when you know to add to it. You don’t have to write anything that’s final-draft material, just something to help adjust the pacing by enhancing the section. 

You may want to rewrite at this stage, but hold off on that. Remember that this part of the concision process isn’t to polish your story. It’s to ensure that everything reads as progressively making sense to the reader, maintaining their attention, and smoothing out structural pacing. This “tweaking” stage is how you’re going to finalize making your story concise. Whatever you add back in from your "cuts" document, you’ll be doing so confidently because you should be able to answer the question as to why it’s getting reincorporated.

The tweaking part of the process can take the most amount of time because you can keep doing it. At some point, you’ll probably feel like you’re going in circles. When that happens, take a step back and re-evaluate what you’re editing and why. If you’ve been working on one scene or chapter for too long, put it away. Come back to it when you’re feeling clear-headed. Perfection may be impossible, but you’ve likely gotten as close to it as you can.

Good luck, and happy writing!

---

About the author: Olivia North-Crotty is a rising senior at Rutgers University of New Brunswick studying English and Creative Writing. She has had her sci-fi flash fiction published by the flash fiction literary journal, 365 tomorrows, and has a paranormal short story ebook out on Amazon.com. She has also written and co-produced music, and enjoys painting, sketching, and reading.

LinkTree to written works and music: https://linktr.ee/olivianc "