Last year I wrote a 4,000-word science fantasy story. It originated in an idea I’d had centering around one particular moment in which the reader realizes that the main characters are not human but aliens. (The aliens find a crashed spaceship with dead humans in it, but the story turned out not really to be about that.)
I only submitted it twice because I felt that something wasn’t quite finished about it. It got rejected, of course.
This month I decided to revisit the story with the goal of making it shorter by about half. Short stories are easier to sell if you don’t have an impressive publication history; plus there are more venues for short fiction than long. So I read the story over, blushed a little bit at the boring introduction and apparently random conclusion, and set to cutting.
Cutting stories is one of my favorite parts of writing. It might sound painful to reduce the first 500 words of a narrative into three paragraphs 150-words long altogether, but the sense of realignment and purification that such drastic changes gives me is well worth it. In short, I enjoy muddling through what I wrote to figure out what I meant.
In an afternoon, I added a new scene yet still cut around 1,000 words from the story–that’s reducing it by a quarter. The next day I cut another 300 words and sent it to my insightful beta reader, who pointed out some places I could further condense. So I trimmed another 400 words, reducing the sprawling 4,000-word monstrosity into a much improved and more easily marketable 2,200-word story. That’s 45% shorter, by the way.
I also changed the title and all the characters’ names. It turned out to be about the alien characters all along. Story makeover complete.
Now to submit it!
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