It's all in the wording!

Word count can play an important part in getting an agent or scaring them off.  My first version of New Zigon came in over 139,000 words.  After doing some research I learned that is way too big.  Established authors can get away with it, but not a newbie like me without any prior publishing credentials.  So, I have been combing through my novel trying to trim it down a bit.

My first step is to pick "the low hanging fruit" as the expression goes.  I am doing word smithing to tell the same story with fewer words.  For instance those "he said" "she said" words can be left out if there are only two people speaking or where the speaker is obvious.  This step also includes trimming unnecessary descriptions.  Have you ever found yourself skimming a paragraph describing the scenery to get to the "good stuff"?  I have.  Trying to read your own writing to pick out boring parts is difficult, let me tell you!  Lastly this step holds the basic rewording task.  Looking at a sentence or paragraph, can it be said with fewer words?

Here's an example of a wordy sentence:

He made a formidable silhouette, his tall and muscular form dressed in dark hunter’s leather, lurking in the shadows of the trees.

How would you trim this down?

Here's a first pass:
He made a formidable silhouette, tall and muscular in dark hunter’s leather, lurking in the shadows of the trees.  

Here are two more options:
His formidable form lurked in the shadow of the trees, tall and muscular.

His tall, muscular form lurking in the shadow of the trees made a formidable silhouette.

This is the one I went with because I wanted the lurking to be the last point:
His tall, muscular form made a formidable silhouette as he lurked in the shadow of the trees.

Bingo!

In my research on how to get my novel published I came across a post on how to write a sentence.  Granted, my beginning sentences are not as bad as the one in the example used in the post, but it is interesting to follow the editor's thoughts in whittling down the writing to get to the best economy of words.  If you want to check it out, be wary; there are several f-bombs sprinkled throughout:
http://www.sfwa.org/2012/08/guest-post-how-to-write-a-sentence/

Lots of fun, eh?

I'm 3/5 through my novel and have cut the words down to under 136,300.  When I'm finished with this run through I'll do another read-through to catch spelling and grammar errors since I've changed so many words.  Then the really tough part begins; do I start cutting scenes?

Stay tuned!