Cutting Golden Idols

So this is hard to admit but I...struggle with my word weight. The little treats are just too hard to resist! Chocolate smooth world building. Light and fluffy humor, whipped to perfection. Lemon tart relationships sprinkled with just enough sweetness to keep the whole thing from turning sour. And puns! Gasp! I never can resist a popped-corny pun. It runs in the family. I blame my dad. But add them all together and and the numbers on that word counter just go up and up and up...



All right, so it sounds a bit ridiculous when I put it that way, but I think it's a fair comparison. It's beyond difficult to shrink a manuscript even when you know it's too long. I should know. I've been trying to cut one down for at least two years. When I finally started making headway this week, it felt like shedding pounds after the holidays. Cue the choir! Sound the trumpets! The diet is finally working!

What diet? Well, maybe that's too strong a word, since cutting all the word calories leaves writing as dry as...well, diet bread. But I kept thinking of something a high school teacher told our class once.

No Golden Idols.

He was a graphic design sort of teacher - computers, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. - and what he meant was don't let one element ruin the whole picture just because you love it. And don't we just have our favorite scenes, especially in our own work? Sometimes they're truly golden. Pivotal scenes we've built whole chunks of our books around. But sometimes our first ideas just doesn't work in the end, and we still can't let go, even when the gold paint starts to flake off, revealing nothing but a great, ugly paperweight.

However I have found, as I've started really cutting into my story with my red pen, that my rewrites usually contain the core of what made me love that scene to begin with. It's like...the one chocolate after dinner. You pick your favorite. And trimming down the word count has forced me to focus on the essential point of debatable scenes. Is this one really doing its job in the story line? Can I say the same thing better, or later, without as much build up? Or does the end reveal deserve that much build up in the first place? Sometimes it doesn't, and I can't let myself be so attached that I wind up keeping the paperweight in place just because I have a soft spot for it.

It is difficult - I would say you definitely need to know where you're going with your story to answer those questions effectively - but, like fitting into your skinny jeans again, the end result just makes you want to get up and dance!