Ruthless Revision: Cutthroat Cutting and Pasting Elsewhere
As a reader, I shy away from the long form. Any book with a spine wider than my thumb sends me into low-key panic. Since I have the honor of reading them in their original language, my first, I feel compelled to know and channel famed works of Russian literature on command. Yet much to my chagrin, it took dogged effort to get through the roughly 800 pages of Anna Karenina. This hefty tome was a drag, despite the masterful elements that ultimately made it worthwhile. It is just so damn long. I wish I could have told Lev Tolstoy what I’m about to advise you: be ruthless in revision, be cutthroat in cutting.
Don’t get me wrong, doing this will hurt. We writers get attached to our words; for us, they are more than ethereal wisps of ideas spun into being. No, they become actual sinewy substance, tangible tissue, visceral extensions of our physical selves that we pour out in words. That’s why it’s easy to get carried away and turn unbearably verbose. I tend to the long-winded myself, tracing my thought process too thoroughly. Although thorough and thoughtful is a golden combination when concise, explaining every last thing can verge on condescending, adding insult to your reader’s intelligence to the injury of wordiness. What’s more, this practice saps your writing of its power, cloaking and dimming its significance.
To dull the excruciating pain of cutting extensively at the very end, (try to) edit as you go. Piecemeal revision — bit by bit throughout the writing process, from concept to draft to pre-publication — reins in your connection to the words, not allowing specific choices to calcify.
BEFORE you write, imagine the completed text. Guesstimate a word count, number of pages, total length. Decide the scope: an individual poem, an epic one, or a series in verse; a piece of flash fiction, a longer short story, an essay, or an article; a book, a collection, or an anthology. A single, fluid unit or one broken into sections, chapters, parts, volumes. From the beginning, open both eyes wide and fix them on the horizon of the writing road ahead. Even if everything changes on the journey, envision it before embarking.
DURING drafting, (try to) hold yourself in check. The stories within the story, asides and potential prequels alike, unfurl often without warning. Soon enough, you drift away from the direction in which you set out. It may be impossible to fight the force of this current. But should you find yourself veering from your original destination and mean to stay course, you have two options. One is to go with it regardless, to let those words flow out of your system and discover where they land you. By the time you’ve exhausted this riptide, your opus may be drastically reoriented. Though if this part is merely a tangent, cut it later.
The other alternative is to stop, backtrack, and locate where you diverged from the prior path. Select the wayward text and cut it. Ruthlessly remove excess and build-up, whether it’s the dressy adjective or adverb, the clever turn of phrase, the fitting cliché, the obvious pun. These may well belong somewhere, just not here. It's not about how many words you use, rather which words and their intended purpose.
Mind you, cutthroat cutting isn’t the same as deleting forever. Append a blank page to your typed document or open a new one. If you’re old school, scribble what you cross out on a fresh sheet of paper. As you expose the barest bones of your content — the fundamental point, the core of the story, the essence of the poem — paste the superfluous there for safekeeping. Go back to the content you’ll keep and resume writing.
AFTER finishing your draft, put it down for a while to detach from words you still deem precious. Then, reread it with ruthless eyes. Scan for anything that strikes you as too much or too long. Read the text aloud with sharpened ears. Your tongue will trip over awkwardness and wordiness. Redundancy and segments entirely out of place will make themselves heard. You may be loath to extract ideas and images that feel like vital organs, albeit failing. Do it anyway. Rest assured that your piece will not suffer as much or as long as your ego; in fact, the wounds will heal without scarring. Just in case, paste anything you cut into your storage file, your emergency stash.
As you continue to revise and polish your work (I do this obsessively, do you?), once you finally grasp what it’s really about and are on the cusp of articulating that perfectly, you’ll be surprised that what seemed indispensable is not. You may not even remember what you discarded, much less miss it. And if something is lacking, you’ll catch that, too. That’s when you can return to your clippings for the right filler. What you’ve excised, you can replace. Unlikely as you are to reinsert exactly what you cut, you’ll be extra discerning when you do, picking only the best, most precise way of writing what you mean. And you can paste the rest elsewhere, like into your next piece.
More on revision
Adaptable to your genre:
12 Contemporary Writers on How They Revise | Literary Hub
Revise Like a Scientist: A Method Approach to Finding the Right Treatment for Your Story | CRAFT Literary
Revising Fiction: Ten Tips To Tighten Your Narrative Style | SouthWest Writers
For nonfiction, particularly thesis-based critical essays:
The Writing Process: Revising | W. W. Norton and Company (link to summary, with thorough tips when you click Next)
An Essay Revision Checklist | ThoughtCo
For novelists, particularly those working with an editor:
Season 3 — Episode 7: Destination: Revision Dumpster | Deadline City (podcast)
For long-form writing, particularly novels:
From Mess to Success: A Writer's Guide to Revision | The Writer