HUGE story win: Price? 2000+ words words cut today, net gain of 670 today, and 3267 to delete tomorrow…

Today went really well from the story perspective.

From the wordcount perspective, not so much. 

I deleted a ton of words back in chapter six, wrote a ton of new words in that chapter, and came up with a net gain of 670 words.

Tomorrow is going to be tougher, because tomorrow I’m going to end up deleting almost 3,267 words… though with luck, I’ll end up being able to save the sentence at the end of that entire chapter…

“And kids in school these days are probably a lot less likely to spread rumors that your mom or grandmother barbecued your father and served him to neighbors on the 4th of July.”

I like that line. I need to keep it. My character lived it.

Meanwhile, my difficult today and tougher tomorrow are brought to me by this single writing truth:

There is always a good idea.

There is always a better idea.

And there is always the right idea.

And today, I uncovered the right idea — the one that pulled all the keepable stuff in the book together. I lost a couple thousand words today.

I replaced them with the right words.

I’ll lose several thousand tomorrow. 

I’ll replace them with the right words. 

And in doing so, I will bring my MC’s past to life for myself and my readers, increase the stakes she faces for the entire series of novels, introduce a truth about an upcoming essential character while hiding that truth in plain sight, and, if I’m lucky, scare the socks off my future readers while at the same time making them laugh.

It is for such days as this that writers live.

Download as PDFPrint Page