Podcast: when your manuscript is too long
With anne hawley & Rachelle Ramirez
Is your novel bursting at the seams? Developmental editor Anne Hawley reveals how she cut 100,000 words from her historical novel – and how you can trim your manuscript without losing its heart. Anne shares battle-tested strategies for identifying and eliminating excess content, including:
How to know if your manuscript is too long for your genre
Four major areas to target for significant cuts
Why "killing your darlings" is so emotionally challenging
Smart techniques for preserving cut content
When to keep your longer manuscript despite industry pressures
Plus, learn why "the reader needs to know this" might be your biggest obstacle to a leaner, stronger story
Whether you're writing fantasy epics or middle-grade fiction, these practical tips will help you craft a manuscript that keeps readers engaged from start to finish.
transcript
Anne Hawley: Are you an over writer? Do you wonder how to cut significant length from a two large manuscript? Then this one's for you. Hello and welcome to the Write Anyway podcast from Pages & Platforms and the Happily Ever Author Club. I'm Anne Hawley, and in today's episode I talk with my fellow developmental editor, Rachelle Ramirez, about cutting 100,000 words from my way too long novel, and what I've learned from helping lots of other fiction authors do the same kind of cuts with theirs.
Rachelle Ramirez: Hey Anne, how are you today?
Anne Hawley: Hi, Rachelle. I am very deep in my creativity and my writing, and I am. I eager to talk about it today.
Rachelle Ramirez: Awesome. Well, what the reason I wanted to interview you today is because I know that you had once a too long novel that you said you really needed to cut to get to a publishable size.
So can you tell me a little bit about how you knew it was too long, why it was too long, why you thought you needed to cut it?
Anne Hawley: That's the first question, isn't it really? Because there is no. Absolute standard for, you know, how long is a book, right? But in my case, it, the, the novel started out as just an endless.
Self-indulgent piece of fan fiction. And when I decided to, as they say, file the serial numbers off and make it a publishable work that could fit comfortably between the covers of a book that didn't look like a doorstopper, I needed to make some serious cuts to the size because it was 220,000 words and no agent for one thing was gonna look at anything over a hundred thousand, even in historical fiction, which it was. But also for, uh, for other writers who are contemplating this problem, if you're writing middle grade, for example, you want something to be under 60,000 words, maybe 40,000.
'cause very young readers are just, don't ask them to read much more than that. If you're writing adult literary fiction, you the sort of, the sky's the limit as far as I can tell, and there's no hard and fast rules, but I think the larger question is whether or not you're going to self-publish, which you can do.
I've seen self-published books that are like this thick. You can do it if you want to. There's nothing stopping you. If you are hoping to market it, whether yourself or to an agent or a publisher, they're going to have word limits for different categories or genres of work. So, for example, fantasy readers generally tolerate a longer book with more detail and longer, more elaborate stories than say contemporary action thriller readers. Horror can sometimes run quite long.
Stephen King's books are famously very long. If you're not Stephen King, you might not have the same, um freedom to do that. But, knowing the market is, is certainly important, but also knowing what you want to write and how you wanna say it is valuable and you should respect that. So somewhere in between, uh, for me it was important to get my book down to as close to under 400 pages as I could because I knew it would look heavy on the shelf at the bookstore. So it was important to me to, to bring it down from this very self-indulgent, very rambling piece of fan fiction to a more concise novel. And when I say concise, I'm still talking slightly over 400 pages. So it was not exactly slim and trim, but I cut a hundred thousand words from it.
Rachelle Ramirez: So generally somebody would know that their novel is likely too long if it's over a hundred thousand words for adults.
Anne Hawley: Okay. Rule of thumb, with a lot of wiggle room there. The industry changes all the time. The fact is that even people who do continue to read and read books and read avidly, have a limited time and attention span for a very, very long book.
Ultimately, it is up to you as the writer, but there's a consideration there that maybe keeping it under a hundred thousand, especially if you're trying to market to an agent who is going to market it to a publisher: smart move. And I've had agents tell me, you know, a hundred thousand is absolutely the outside.
And that's for historical where again, like fantasy, historical readers will tolerate a little bit longer of a book. 90, 80, 85 around in there is kind of standard say romance, women's fiction, that type of thing. Yeah.
Rachelle Ramirez: So you knew that you had a too long novel and you took it to an editor who had what she thought was a pretty simple solution for cutting it down.
Yeah. Cut it into two pieces
Anne Hawley: and sell it as two separate books. This was not very helpful advice. She took me at my word that I really wasn't willing to change the type of book it was. And the type of book it was was historical with a fairly sort of leisurely style. And so she said, okay, well then if you're not willing to cut it down, then cut it in half and sell it as two books.
That was not an answer. There was a single character arc. There was a clear beginning, middle, and end to the story, and just chopping it in half did not strike me as a solution, so I had to go seeking other solutions.
First thing I did after I got this editorial feedback that didn't really help me very much was go through and do what you learned in your creative writing class or whatever.
Uh, go check for too many adverbs, too much exposition. Do you have too many little gestures? I have had a tendency to describe too much sort of stage directions for my characters, and I went through and took all that out and that got me about 2% of the manuscript cut where I needed to cut closer to 50%.
And there I was. I was like, I, I just, I, I've done all I can. What else can I possibly do without destroying my story? And that's when I decided to really dig into the question of what makes it too long? It wasn't boring to me. I thought it was fascinating, and I had plenty of readers of the fan fiction who thought it was great and loved it.
So why is it still too long? And the answer to that question first came in, do you need every scene? And to understand the answer to that question, I had to understand where I had two scenes that did effectively the same thing. This is especially true in the middle of the book. That middle part, the big chunk, the 80% of the novel, that's where I tended to have scenes that served the same purpose. So for example, my main character encountered his biggest social fear more than once.
You only need that once. So there was a scene that I liked very much, and I had to decide which one of the two that were effectively duplicative I could cut, maybe bring some of the material over into one, but I could cut a whole scene.
And once I started to realize that I could cut whole scenes, then I started to rack up the word count cuts, right? Because a scene is a thousand, 1500, 2000 words at a time that you're just chopping out. And then there's some work of stitching those raw edges together where you made the cuts. But if you wanna get word count, the first thing to do is do all your scenes work?
Do they all serve a unique purpose? Does each one carry the story forward in a unique way?
And there's ways of analyzing that, which we probably don't have time to go into in much detail here. We've got lots of work on that in the Story Path Course and the H.E.A. club. Um, but once I started to do that, I found another couple of things that were making me have excess scenes and they didn't seem excess 'cause they weren't duplicative.
Right. But they were scenes that were supporting one of three main areas that authors sometimes forget to think about:
duplicative characters. There'd be a scene where my main character is interacting with secondary character number one, and then having a similar interaction with secondary character number four over here.
Could I combine those two characters? And I found that indeed I could. That meant cutting some characters. Goodbye, dear characters. But you know, they were secondary or tertiary characters. So cutting characters allowed me to compress scenes together. Too many characters, duplicative characters. Two different characters who serve the same function for the protagonist.
Too many locations. Do your characters move around from place to place? And is the getting from place to place taking up words that you don't need? Is the description of the place just sheerly letting the reader accustom themselves to the new location, taking up too many words?
Or is the character themselves getting used to the new place taking up words? Do you need that location? So cutting the locations. I had a little bit of wandering around, more than my story called for.
I've seen in client work especially a problem in like action adventure stories often, fantasy type stories set in an imaginary world or a fantasy world that the author has lovingly invented.
And so it felt important to start with to the author-- and I've written fantasy myself, i've done this --to walk us through the territory. So a place between two places is the journey itself, and you probably don't need it if nothing much really happens in this particular part of the world that you wanted to describe.
I had that more in a historical sense where the world was quite real, it was set in England, where I just didn't need that journey. I didn't really need someone to go away and then come back and then go away again. Could you compress that? So that was something that I was able to make some significant cuts.
This also somewhat changes your plot. It'll take work once you've cut that like extra location or that extra journey to the location. But you will get word count cut significantly and your story will probably be easier to follow, more streamlined, more direct.
So you have cut excess characters, cut excess locations. And then what about subplots?
Rachelle Ramirez: Dun, dun, dun, dun dun.
Anne Hawley: Um, everybody loves a subplot. There's nothing wrong with subplots. A good story needs a subplot. For example, in my case, this is primarily a love story with a very strong social pressure, what we call a validation story, subplot, but did I really need the third one?
There was a little bit of a crime. I needed the sort of crime thing to happen, but it really wasn't about like investigating, who did it, so cutting a subplot is your third way of cutting significant words.
And again, this all goes back to when I cut a subplot. I can probably cut a whole scene. Very often, the character, the subplot, and the scene, the excess of each of those, comes together in one place, and you're cutting 3000 words all at once.
Rachelle Ramirez: All right, so possibilities are cutting scenes, cutting duplicative characters, cutting a location or two or more perhaps. Mm-hmm. Which includes traveling from location to location.
Anne Hawley: Often yes. You waste words just showing people going somewhere and nothing's happening in the going.
Rachelle Ramirez: And then in cutting subplots, which would be the, uh, subplot that doesn't push the character to change as much as other subplots or doesn't offer as much conflict or pressure perhaps as the other subplots that you're gonna choose to keep.
Anne Hawley: I think that's fair. And one thing that I've noticed in client work, um, it's easier for me to see in client work than it is in my own by the way, is the subplot is often an interesting by way. That really doesn't affect your protagonist at all. It's like kind of cool or maybe it can be served by just eventually the protagonist finds out about this thing that happened that I didn't need to describe the entire subplot of how it happened or who made it happen. So that can be a way of looking and searching your manuscript for an opportunity to make a cut.
Rachelle Ramirez: What about backstory? Is that something you run into commonly with clients?
Anne Hawley: Backstory is often, like, it acts like a subplot. It comes in the category of, and we, we hear this all the time from clients in the HEA club, and I get it in my private clients. You just, you gotta understand. I hear that.
It's like, you gotta understand. Okay. But, but before you explain that, I need you to know this. Right? I'll ask the question, do I. I need to understand? And the answer is really almost all the time, no, I don't need to understand it in the way you needed to understand it to write it.
And a dear friend of mine, a good writer says What you need to write your story is not what I need to read it.
You need to understand way more about your story to write it than the reader needs it to read it. So one of the ways I cut 5,000 words was that I had 5,000 words of just backstory, early life story, about the two characters, before they met, when they were kids.
And okay, my story starts when they're adults. We do not need to go back to when they were 15 years old. But I needed to know all of that about both of my main-- the protagonist and the love interest-- to know exactly why they would say and do what they're gonna say and do on the page in the plot, in the course of the actual story. And I was able to convey like 5,000 words of detailed backstory, which I had a lot of fun writing, it took a ton of research to write it, and when it came time for me to make these cuts, I found a scene where I could, in literally three words of dialogue, suggest that entire backstory.
And that moment when I realized, oh, three words, 5,000 words, that the penny dropped. And it's like, wow, okay. For one thing, it cut 5,000 words, but also it let the reader experience that wonderful feeling that you have, well, I mean, I hope it was wonderful. People told me that it was, it was for me. Um, when you're reading and, and the author has given you just a hint and you get it, it's like, oh my god. You know, look at that. And it adds to the joy of reading because it's, it's mystery and the coin drops and this satisfying feeling of understanding, expanding in their mind instead of you just standing up in front of the classroom with a stick, you know, and a piece of chalk on the blackboard and saying, now you need to understand this, and that's no fun.
But it's really fun when you go, oh! You know that feeling, if you can give that in three words or a sentence or a very short scene based on everything you know, and the 10,000 words you've written about the backstory of your character, that is a gift to the reader, and the book will be a lot shorter.
Rachelle Ramirez: So one of the things that you said was if you, the author, find yourself saying, "but you need to understand" that that might be someplace that you want to cut.
Determining where your story actually begins, which is in your case it was, they're adults, so we're not gonna go back to their childhood necessarily, unless perhaps, and I'm guessing, and correct me if I'm wrong, those three words were maybe one character saying something to another character that let them in on their own personal background.
Anne Hawley: Exactly. In dialogue. Yeah.
Rachelle Ramirez: Okay. That makes sense. So why is it that it is so hard to make these cuts, when we have a manuscript that we've written and we realize, oh my gosh, it's too long, or an editor, developmental editor has told us, Hey, this is too long, or an agent has told us that. Why is it so hard to make those cuts?
Anne Hawley: Well, I can really only speak for myself, but I think I've heard enough authors suggest the same problem. Most of us don't write a scene for no reason. We're in it and we're like, okay, next I wanna show this and I want 'em to face this. And I have this idea. And you're emotionally attached to this work because you put a lot of yourself into it, and you should put a lot of yourself into it.
It's your writing, it's the most important thing you're doing. And so when it's like, I have to cut, I, I love that scene. I don't wanna cut that scene. No, you don't. I get it. I totally get it. And you have to, and it's really hard. And sometimes that love of the scene is a sign that you should keep it, but this is where that horrible, horrible expression "kill your darlings" does actually come in.
It's like you love all your scenes. I mean, obviously if you read your whole manuscript and you find your own scenes boring, yeah, you should probably cut those and that probably won't hurt. But generally, what we've written, we've written passionately, we've written with great, you know, sort of intense focus and engagement and flow, and so cutting them is painful. It really is.
And as soon as I cut a scene, I mentioned this earlier, but it creates a plot problem. I do have to stitch the edges together. And that's hard work. That feels a little less creative. It's like mending and, and kind of fixing. And it can be, very challenging and not often as much fun as that flow state writing was.
So both of those things. I don't want to cut this beloved scene 'cause I really, really liked it. Sometimes we tell people, well save that for when you're marketing your book, here's a deleted scene from my novel. , That can work for you if it helps.
It can also help, it helps me to keep that deleted scene in a file. I call it my cutting room floor. People have different names for the files. And I have never once looked back at my cutting room floor, but it gave me a lot of comfort to have that over there, saved forever, not gone, forgotten, but not gone.
And, so that can help to overcome that pain. But it is, it's, it's very personal. It's very emotional and it creates more work.
Rachelle Ramirez: Which also adds a little bit of word count. So you've cut say 5,000 , you've pulled out this super extra long scene and it was 5,000 words, but it might take you 500 or even a thousand to mend it between the two scenes. Right. So yeah, I can imagine that would be challenging.
Anne Hawley: Yeah. And while I was cutting this long, long, long masterpiece, I also kept very close tabs on my word count. And instead of the process of, how many words have I written today, I kept a tab, how many have I cut today.
I cut this many, and now my word count is this. And it was encouraging because I could see progress. It was the number going down instead of up, but it was progress and that helped too.
Rachelle Ramirez: And does it help to take a little bit of time and space from your manuscript before you start doing these deep cuts? If cutting is a challenge for you, does time at all help you get a little bit more objective than subjective?
Anne Hawley: I don't honestly see how there's any other way to do it. If you've just spent the last nine, let's say nine months, just pouring out this novel, all these scenes, and you're close to them and you still remember how you felt and what you were thinking when you were writing that scene, you remember it vividly, it's still very present and alive for you. It's really 10 times harder to see that it needs cutting and then to make the cut.
So, yeah. But I don't know how long. It's gonna depend on how your mind works and what kind of person you are and what kind of book it is. But certainly after you've gotten to the end of your draft at The End and oh, I'm done, maybe a couple weeks at the minimum to let it kind of rest and settle and kind of even out, so that you can come back to it with fresh eyes and with some sense of surprise.
There's no better feeling than coming back to something you've written, going, ha, that was pretty good. You know? And that's kind of fun to have happen and, and sometimes you can see that the goodness and what you definitely don't wanna cut more clearly after a couple of weeks, maybe a month or two.
And then also you can see, oh yeah, this is kind of boring. So, yeah, a little time. Certainly. I wouldn't turn right back around and start cutting. That just hurts just to think about it.
Rachelle Ramirez: I often hear the, uh, client say, yeah, that part, this part, these scenes here particularly are boring, but the reader needs to know that in order to get from one place to another. So in that case, it wouldn't be backstory for "the reader needs to know," but it could be any other excuse that someone says, "but the reader needs to know, but the reader needs to know." So it sounds like that applies to a number of the things, like maybe the boring scenes, the scenes that are duplicates of one another, moving from location to location, maybe not subplot, but also the backstory.
Anne Hawley: I think there's a tendency while you're writing in particular, and I have seen this, to map out the characters' every action that seems even slightly important or realistic. Okay. So realistic is often, even in fantasy or whatever, the realistic thing here would be, well, they'd stop and have a meal.
And meal scenes famously rarely serve a story purpose. There's a couple of instances where they do. I remember confronting a client with this one time, like, I, I don't need this many meal scenes.
She was very avid about, they were traveling in Italy and the food was really good. Okay. I maybe you're writing a food book that, that's a little bit different story, but I said, yeah, but you've got a lot of meal scenes in here.
And she said, "well, but I mean, at this point in the story, they would need to eat. It's dinner time."
So I said, yeah, at what point in the story did they need to stop and go to the bathroom? And she goes, well, I would, you know, you don't need to show that. Well, yeah, you don't need to show every meal either.
So similarly with traveling from place to place, if it's important that the character go from point A to point B, then get them to point B quickly. There's probably very little happening on the airplane, in the car, even in the spaceship, that is super relevant to your story. Maybe just get them to the other planet, the other town, the house next door, whatever the journey distance may be, without showing every step.
So I always bring up that going to the bathroom example because it's so obvious. Yes, it's realistic that people have to do these things. They have to sleep, they have to wake up. They have to eat. But is that story? No. Very often the answer is no, probably not.
And the key phrase that I like to remember is that characters are not real people. And stories are not real life. They're supposed to feel like real life and real people. What you want is verisimilitude, not detailed autobiography.
Rachelle Ramirez: Right, right. That's great. Well, is there anything else that we might need to know about cutting scenes, or anything else we need to know about what it might take to get a novel shorter?
Anne Hawley: I think those key ideas that we've talked about are the primary ones for getting bulk word cut out. Don't depend on just cleaning up your line by line pros, although definitely do that if that's important to you. But I also just want to add again, and stress again, like we started at the beginning:
if you are writing a novel that in your heart is just kind of a long novel and you love that and you're happy with it, go for it.
But if you then get feedback from beta readers, from your critique group, from an agent, that's saying it's too long and you are willing to alter the work of your heart to meet a market demand or to meet an opportunity to be published, these are some tips you can use.
But I would not ever tell a writer that Absolutely, your book is too long because it is a 101,000 words, when 100,000 is the top limit. I would not say that.
So be aware of the parameters that you're trying to meet, and respect your own intuition and your own love of your writing at the same time.
Right. So if your novel is say, 115,000 words and you love it and you've looked at it and you think every scene is a scene that you want in there, you are not saying get in there and cut it and make it under a hundred thousand words.
Not necessarily, although again, I would say if your novel is 115,000 words, there are probably-- probably-- opportunities for trimming at the sort of more micro level of a little bit too much exposition, maybe a description that's too long or a little bit of backstory, slipped in there, that type of thing. Extra words in sentences. Some bad habits that you may have that you may not be aware of in you're just line by line writing, that you could probably shave 5,000 off that without harming a single thing about your heartfelt expression.
Rachelle Ramirez: So if a writer has listened to what you've said here in this podcast today and still doesn't quite know what to do with their too long manuscript, what do you suggest that they do?
Anne Hawley: Well, first of all, I would to, to toot our own horns here, I would suggest a great thing to do is, watch for opportunities for our Scene Workshop., We have a one hour short version and then we sometimes, a couple times a year, we offer a three day live class where we go through what constitutes a working scene and what doesn't, and it becomes just crystal clear where your scenes are not working and that can be a big step forward.
Rachelle Ramirez: And specifically where you could cut large portions, probably of a scene that you thought you needed as well.
Anne Hawley: Cut whole scenes. Yeah.
Rachelle Ramirez: Right, right. So, would it help then to possibly hire a developmental editor if you're at that point and stuck?
Anne Hawley: Yes, it absolutely would. If you know who you're dealing with-- Rachelle, you're a good, very good developmental editor and, um, I, I've done a fair amount of it myself.
And, yes, if your developmental editor is there to help you see where the story lags, where scenes don't work, to be very specific about that, then it's absolutely a way to go. It is also an expensive way to go. So one of our goals in the HEA club and with the Story Path course is to help authors get as far down the developmental editing road as they can on their own without disgorging the fairly large sum of money that a developmental editor will charge. This all arose from that experience of mine where I paid that editor a lot of money to read those 220,000 words, and I didn't really get as much back as I should have for the money.
Rachelle Ramirez: Yeah. I think you've said a few times that it's one of the main reasons you became an editor.
Anne Hawley: Exactly. Because I couldn't afford to do it again. I did it once. It didn't go as well as I'd hoped. This is no shade to that particular editor. I just didn't know what I was asking for and didn't ask for it right, and I got what I asked for, but I didn't have any more money to do it again.
Rachelle Ramirez: Well, thank you so much for sitting down to talk with me today and sharing this with listeners. I really appreciate it.
Anne Hawley: Thank you, Rachelle. Always a pleasure. Talk to you again soon.
Right. Bye. Bye.
You can learn more about the Happily Ever Author Club, including the Story Path Course and our Scene Workshop at storypath.me/hea. And if you'd like a weekly dose of writing, insight and mindset and marketing tips for authors in your inbox, subscribe to the Write Anyway newsletter at pagesandplatfomrs.com/subscribe.
And that's it for this episode of the Write Anyway Podcast. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.