Editing for length

Last night I finished writing the short I want to submit for that contest. They have a length limit of 2000 words – I topped out, rushed, at 2354 words. On the one hand, the effort of tightening your writing to meet a word limit is freaky and exhilirating. You find yourself removing garbage that only repeats or states the obvious. You remove words and sentences that only serve to state the obvious. What you get when you extrace over 300 words from a story is definitely something that is more concise, more “tight” than what you started with.

It hurts, too, the cutting for length. There are a few things I had aimed to do in the story that I never got a chance to. Instead, the hints and foreshadows just became extra junk, crowding the story.

I think I’m going to let the story sit for a day, re-read it, and send it on to the contest. No harm in trying 🙂