Writing Articles

Cutting the flab from your manuscript during a rewrite is important in making your manuscript clean, trim and most important - commercially viable.

During the last eight years, dozens of the large publishing houses have merged and become huge corporate conglomerates, five to be exact, controlled by a Board of Directors that is solely motivated by the bottom line, the net profit of the company. That's the reason some editors, even if they like the manuscript of a first-time writer, will take a pass on the manuscript. The reason? Solely because the writer doesn't have a large enough reader following to guarantee the appropriate minimum profit for the publisher. They can't get fired for passing but they might get the "axe" for not achieving the mandated bottom line profit. So editors take the easy way out, they pass.

In many instances, a few years ago, editors would have brought these very same writers around slowly and in a few years - after three or four books - would have a new best selling author with a significant profit to report to the Board.

Therefore, any manuscript, but especially a first, is mighty important for a writer. A well-written, tight manuscript has much more appeal for any editor rather than one that is loose and wordy. It's much easier to take a bloated manuscript and trim it down than it is to pad the pages with words in the hope of making the end product interesting to an editor or ultimately, a reader.

The dilemma that faces most writers with "fat" manuscripts is they aren't sure where to start cutting the flab. In today's extremely competitive market, publishers will frequently put a word maximum of 85,000 to a 100,000 words on a new manuscript. This is a format that they like to use to keep editing, paper and printing costs down to a set formula. This doesn't mean that if a terrific manuscript comes in from a new writer of 150,000 words, that the publisher will automatically say, "no," but it better be terrific.

Some of the areas you might consider cutting are repetitive words and phrases. Readers don't like it where writers repeat things several times; they get the feeling that they are being considered "stupid," and, it takes more than once for something to sink in. Give the reader credit for understanding the meaning of the entire situation without repeating the words a number of times. You'll see that you can quickly pare down your manuscript.

Sometimes you can repeat phrases for an effect like in the movie, "Marty," an Oscar winner several years ago, written by Paddy Chayefsky. In the film, the scene used repetition for effect when Marty was asked several times by his buddy, what he would do on this particular Saturday night. Marty responded by saying, that he didn't know, but what did his buddy want to do. This dialogue between the two friends only emphasized the fact that both of the men were bored and had nothing to do. It was very effective and won a number of film awards for the year of 1958.

Another place to look to cut is the use of an abundance of adverbs or adjectives. This doesn’t mean to eliminate descriptive phrases but use them sparingly and only when they add to the scene. A caveat for writers is that "cutting the flab" should apply only to words that don't add new information for the reader, because you can often delete them without any noticeable effect in the story. Frequently, it even increases the pace of the story.

The last warning is that most "flab" applies to narrative rather than dialogue. Writers, be careful when "slenderizing dialogue," because dialogue also characterizes the person as much as clothes, physical attributes or education, and repetition can provide important insight to the individual personality. Take for instance a character that speaks very slowly or even stutters but only when nervous. You certainly wouldn't want to cut out any of that dialogue because it's probably important to the story. And, be sure that when you're cutting, use a sharp knife so the end results will be much cleaner and more interesting.