8 Tips for Cutting Your Book's Word Count (Writing Advice)

Have you been overwriting? Learn how to cut unnecessary words and filler from your stories and novels.

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[BenavolutionArt]

I cut 500 instances of "that" 😂 from my novel. This word reduction business is no joke.

[MichaelJPartyka]

I just entered a short story into a competition where the limit was 1000 words. My initial draft came in at 1300+ words, and I didn't know if it'd be possible to cut out enough. It was indeed possible, though, and I had to cut out a side character to do it, just as the first point in your video says!

[simplewrites]

This is good advice. I'd like to add upon it and say what I think the reason for making these mistakes is.

Word count.

Yes, that's the point of the video but hear me out. New writers (myself included) have at some heard that a novel have a certain amount of words and that if their story is not that long it can't be considered one. When I heard about this, I immediately thought "Okay, so I have to make sure I have this amount of words". And this was bad because I started focusing on just filling the "word quota" instead of writing a good story, as if it being shorter or longer than what some people considered to be the proper length somehow made it worse.

Bottom line, write good stories not short, medium, or long stories. The word count has zero impact on your work's quality.

[stephenwashingtonjr]

I was wondering how to write good female characters that aren't Mary Sues or serve a purpose to the story. I would love to know that in a good vs bad video. But love your videos and Abby Emmons’ videos. You two are the best writing channel. Thanks again

[faithrosebrair]

Can you do a video on how to do beautiful book covers that draw attention.

[taragnor]

The importance of good pacing can't be overstated. As a reader/watcher, slow pacing is the #1 thing that will lose me. I can't count the number of times I've lost interest in a movie/novel because there were too many slow needless scenes, especially in the opening. It doesn't matter how good the finale is if your audience doesn't reach it. Brandon really knows what he's talking about here, his excellent pacing stood out to me in his novels. It is by far his greatest strength as a writer.

[Hamed-vsor]

We feel happy that your videos are very helpful to us. Everyone is grateful to you because this content you provide has benefited us a lot. May you talk about how you write comedy in the next video

[xzx]

The more dialogue revisions I do, the more words that gets cut. 😂

[johnhughes]

I managed to avoid having to cut down one section of my novel. One of my main characters goes on trial for murder, but the trial is only a means to an end in the story and certainly not the main focus, so I didn't force the reader to plod through every witness being on the stand and summarised a lot of it. It also meant I didn't have to invent a complex legal system and lots more cameo characters.

[ludovico]

Oh boy that's not my problem! I need to beef up novel projects that started as short stories but got too big in scope for short stories.

[rossdavidson]

I like to keep, generally, to, "the rule of 3."

Two points of contention and a resolution.

Three pieces of evidence.

Three phases of a conversation.

Etc

Less than three can leave the story feeling incomplete. More than three can bloat it unnecessarily. Obviously not a hard rule, but a good guideline, I find.

[davidaleshire]

Gotta give you a huge thank-you for this video. My first manuscript is about 440 pages, probably a bit much for a paranormal rom-com. This helps big time.

[unicorntomboy]

Is 45, 000 words veering into novel territory? My current gothic fantasy Y.A book was originally intended to be a novella. It is 29, 000 in so far, and it was intended to be complete at 35, 000, but there is so much scope left in my main story, such as a boss fight with a giant armor spider, that my original goal won't be adequate. My book takes much inspiration from The Lion King (borrowing the basic plotline of it) mixed in with Demon Souls and Coraline

A secondary question: How do you catch the audience up to speed with who a character is and what their status quo is, after a large time skip (as in years or even decades long ones) using some exposition?

[LordBaktor]

Once one has a draft zero (which I don't, yet), what are some good "prep-work" strategies out there. Should one write a general description and backstory for every character? Map out the whole plot with post-it notes to be able to shuffle scenes around? Design the character web you mention in this video? What is enough prep-work and what is a deranged amount of unnecessarily detailed prep-work?

[jotham]

Getting rid of filter words can also help a lot.

[artmanoo]

I am writing/publishing a five book series. I've published the first three. Sales have been OK but not stellar. With what I'm paying my editor the ROI is atrocious lol. At least so far. The third book is under 100k, easily the shortest in the series. But I'm dreading paying to have the 4th one edited. It is the *longest* book in the series. It was over 160K words. I have been over it a few times lately and trimmed about 2K words but I want to trim down a lot more. There's a lot going on in the book, I have the main plot and 3 subplots. I know, that's too many, right? But all of them have a solid purpose, some of it world building. I only have one book after that, the epic finale, and then it's done. I've done all your tips in this video already except for cutting a subplot. It would be very hard to do because they're all tightly woven together in the fabric of the story. This is gonna be hard.

[WilliamJ-udln]

cutting word count is the kind of problem id like to have

[thesolitarywitch]

Thank you. This was helpful. I was struggling to cut words out of mine.

[afternoonbears]

Hey Brandon! How do you create such great videos whilst writing your novels? How do you make time for both? I would LOVE to have your secret!!!

[JamestheXennial]

I have a bit of the opposite problem re: side characters. I'm not to the point in my drafting where I am crafting the side characters yet, but I'm somewhat worried about, when I do reach that point, how to make them important (on a lesser level than the main protagonists, of course) to the story. Because I'm writing a detective novel, I want to make at least a couple of them red herrings, but not to seem like they're forced in there JUST for that purpose.