WRITE NOW NEWSLETTER – NOVEMBER 2014
“All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary—it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.” – Somerset Maugham
Hi, Writers:
Shortly before Ed and I moved to New Mexico, a friend gave me a going away present. It was a tiny dictionary. In the front she wrote, “So you’ll never be at a loss for words.”
Right now I have the opposite problem. After I completed another pass through the ginormous manuscript about running my first marathon, the word count stands at 114,400. This is down from 190,000 words, but still.
Last night when I couldn’t sleep I pulled up memoir after memoir on amazon.com and looked at the page count. Multiplying by the approximately 250 words per page confirmed my fears. The word count of book after book totaled something close to 80,000 words, 34,000 fewer than my current manuscript.
I have options. I could turn the story into two books. I could ignore editorial wisdom and let the book stand at nearly one and a half times the conventional word count of most memoirs. I could pay someone else to figure out what to do. I could put it in a drawer and start something new. Or I could do the thing I most dread: cut more words.
You know what I’ll choose. Wish me luck! And if you have any tips for whacking still more of my precious prose from this document, please post them on my blog Bum Glue.
Nita Sweeney
(c)Nita Sweeney, 2014, all rights reserved
Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/NitaSweeney
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