I meant to write this post a lot earlier, but the novel workshop got in the way. I blew past my goal of 70,000 words to write 83,000 words. I’m excited about this book. It’s extremely first draft-y, but I feel like I’ve got a lot of the bare bones in place. And, importantly, it’s already within the preferred word counts for the horror genre.

A huge part of the reason why this book is the way that it is results from the book that I am currently querying. It’s an adult dark fantasy novel of 115,000 words, which is already pushing the boundaries of what agents will consider for its genre. It used to be 215,000 words. When I participated in the Futurescapes novel workshop, the kind Julie Gwinn told me that it needed to be no longer than 150,000 words, so I started making plans for big cuts. It ultimately took me three rounds of cuts and large-scale edits to get the book to where it is now. It taught me a lot about editing and a lot about that specific book, most notably that I probably should go ahead and turn it into two books. (I had heard that question/advice from people for more than a year and it took me getting to know my book at this intimate level to see how I could reasonably make that break while making each half of the story feel balanced with the other.)

The bad news is, if you’re reading as a new writer, there is a chance that you will be like me. Sometimes, the best teacher is experience. I hope for you that you do not have to cut this many words from your book, nevertheless, you might find yourself in this situation.

In hopes, therefore, of being as helpful as I can, and after hearing a number of people ask, “How the hell did you do that!?” I’d like to try to tackle the overall feat, problem, joy, and torment that is editing your novel. In particular, I am talking predominantly this time about big-picture editing, what is usually referred to as “developmental editing.” Essentially, how to look at the forest rather than the trees. Not that line and copy edits are not important, but in my experience it is easier to figure out on your own how to polish individual sentences and paragraphs. I had a much harder time learning how to make the big changes happen, because that involves understanding the book’s identity.

Stage One: Reverse Outline

I’m partial to physical media. My brain operates best when I can unpack it onto a physical page (or many pages) and take a look at things there. I can be messier in physical space, making notations, drawing lines and arrows, and importantly, laying out every sheet of paper on the floor if I need to in order to get the full picture.

This is to say, your mileage may vary, as usual, but I prefer to do this step in hard copy. I usually open a new notebook for this purpose, because I’m going to need a fair amount of space.

The hidden first step, in between writing my novel and editing my novel, is to let it sit for a while without looking at it. I’m going to give the novel I just finished a good month of doing other things so that when I arrive, I’ve forgotten some things. Any of the late-night brainwaves that made some scenes make sense while I was writing it will have faded. I am coming to the page as close to an outside reader as I can manage. Of course, it is helpful to have notes from actual outside readers, too, but the reverse outline is about YOU reading YOUR book.

Here it goes: Read your book. As you read, outline. The purpose of this step is to figure out not what you sketched out in any initial planning or outlining that you completed, it is to understand what you have actually written. What have you actually included? For the default “unit,” I like to follow chapter divisions. These will probably change throughout the story, but your chapters should, conceptually, already be self-contained segments of scenes and interactions.

Things to include in your outline:

• The things that happen!
• What your character(s) are thinking. Bonus note: start to track for yourself how they change by noting how they relate to the theme.
• Statements or questions about the theme.
• Shifts in setting/time/weather.

I like to write an entire chapter all out at once in the same color, and then go through after and highlight or underline in coded colors. Sometimes I will realize after the fact that a single point is relevant to both character and setting, or where theme and plot are laced together.

This will be time-consuming. It will require focus. For me, it also required the discipline not to stop and fix little things I saw along the way. Resist that urge! You can absolutely start to make notes in your outline about how you want things to change, but keep in mind what you are trying to do in this stage: show yourself what story you have written.

When you have outlined the whole book beginning to end, it’s time for stage 2.

Stage Two: Analyze and Re-Outline

You can really see my “plotter” showing! I love my outlines upon outlines, but this is what I have figured out works for my brain.

At this point, I put the book away. I’m not interested in looking directly at the text at this point, because the goal for this stage is to see what shape the book has taken and decide how I need to restructure it. As I am working on this step, I might even create multiple new outlines as I refine down the book’s new shape. When I needed to cut 100,000 words, I created even more than that. From my outline of what was contained within my book, I created a timeline that tracked the plot, the actions and arcs of my main characters (and some significant secondary characters), and flagged chapter breaks. This gave me two different ways to visualize the changes taking place throughout the book. Once I had could see how I wanted to restructure things, I created a new, traditional outline about of the combination of the previous two.

But let’s get back to the method: When I’m analyzing the outline I made in the previous step, I’m trying to find places where things don’t quite work. This is a great way to look for plot holes or problems in relationship arcs. In the form of an outline, I can track cause and effect more clearly and find places where payoff is absent or stakes either feel too low or are nonexistent. I also can see more clearly where something happens just because I want it to happen and not because it is what needs to happen.

While evaluating the outline, I want to see the overall plot arc and check each chapter to see how it contributes to that arc. I study how individual characters’ arcs change, how they are influenced by/contribute to the plot, and whether changes throughout the arc are earned. I am also evaluating whether some characters are even needed.

If you are using this method, here are questions you might consider as you work through the outline of each chapter or scene:

• What does this scene contribute to the book?
• If I removed it, how would the story change?
• What do the characters in this scene contribute?
• Are there any characters that do not need to be here, or without whom the scene would not change?

Critically, this is the stage at which you get to decide if you need to take the book in a different direction than originally planned. Maybe you thought you were writing one theme, but now that the whole thing is laid out, you realize you were thinking of a different theme. Great! You can begin to build plot and character arcs around that new theme. There are versions of these questions, though, that I ask myself at a book-wide scale while it is in this state, reduced to bullet points:

• What does this character contribute to the book?
• What does this sub-plot contribute to the book?
• Do I like this plot thread?
• Is there an alternative subplot that I could create that would be more impactful (higher stakes, better flow, etc.)?

And while the book is still just bullet points, you can add new and different ones.

“Killing Your Darlings” vs. Doing What the Story Needs

The main character of my book used to have a step mother and step sisters. The step mother already felt like a drag on the story when I sat down to edit, but I quite liked the arcs of the step sisters and the way their relationship to the main character changed. However, I found that including their scenes weighed things down. The main character did not really need those sisters for her character arc, they did not do much of anything to advance the plot, and I found that I could keep the things I liked about the sisters’ scenes by shifting the important action to a character more significant to the story.

When it comes to cutting word count, we have all often heard that we need to, “kill our darlings.” Although I was sad to remove two characters I liked from the story, I did not feel that I was losing something because I did not simply slash and burn their scenes. In my editing, I find it much more energizing to ask myself a series of questions with the goal of streamlining a scene or chapter while keeping all the things I like about it:

• What do I like about this moment that I don’t want to lose?
• Is it something that I can hold onto and save for another moment?
• Is it something that I can give to another character or object in the same scene?

I still think of those sisters! I still think of the grandmother’s love interest. However, I also have found that giving things up or moving them around to another person can create higher stakes and build stronger relationships between the characters I do keep. There is a spell book that used to be something the main character found by chance in a shop, and there were chapters with her reading it. But those felt flat, so I gave the book to the main love interest instead, and lo and behold! A new secret for them to share, a new chance for them to bond, and instead of stale scenes of the main character reading this book, the characters are now learning together.

Don’t think of it as having to kill your darlings. It’s not death, it’s change.

Using “Save the Cat” or Similar

I don’t typically sit down to write my books based on a plot template (or, I adapt them to my uses, like the novel I just finished that scrambles the Hero’s Journey with John Clute’s horror novel structure), but they can be a great tool for editing. Elsewhere, I have mentioned Rowan Brighton Brown’s Word Count, Goals, and Beats spreadsheet. When I was trying to cut so many words from my novel, I found it helpful to lean on these kinds of structures in order to understand where I had perhaps dwelled too long and the story had grown unproportional.

The worksheet provides wordcount estimates for two models: Save the Cat and Dan Wells’s Seven Layer Plot. Neither of these felt quite right as-is, so I spent a little time thinking about what plot beats I wanted to track. I ended up leaning more on Wells’s structure, because I liked the point-counterpoint interplay as critical thematic and character moments. My novel has two very distinct sections, and it made more sense to me to have one mid point and one inverse midpoint: two huge moments during which the character has an important development and theme revelation, and between them, a low point in which it seems that everything they learned was a lie and from which they have to rebuild.

I meta-outlined my book based on my own modification of this structure, and used Wells’s touchpoints to estimate how far, percentage-wise, I should be into my book at each point. By calculating where these points should be in the word count, I was able to see that, wow, I spend way too much time in between midpoint 1 and pinch point 2. I was able to turn my attention to those specific chapters and scenes to shave off what moments did not contribute to the character’s arc.

If you’re struggling to find places to cut, you might consider doing the same!

After all of this, carefully evaluating scenes, chapters, and overall arcs, I was able to draft a new outline that brought together what I wanted to keep with the scenes that needed to be reshuffled and reshaped and the new moments that would need to be written wholly from scratch.

Stage Three: Rebuild

With this new outline, all I needed to do was the hard part: enacting my plan. In the end, I needed to repeat this process three times in order to reduce the size of the book as much as I needed. It was not until my third pass that I implemented Wells’s plot model. I finally wondered, “If the book needs to be 115,000 overall, then how much allowance do I have between the hook and the inciting incident? Between the ‘dark night of the soul’ and the resolution?” On every draft, I saved totally new versions. Never, ever simply delete old material! You never know when you’ll use it. I have scenes that I had removed from earlier drafts of the book that I ended up pulling back in again because they did important work for me. I have already taken one scene that wasn’t right for this book and slotted it into a new one, where it is much more at home!

Remember, nothing is wasted. Any time spent thinking about your book is work on the book, even if the words themselves don’t make it into the final manuscript.

Once the new manuscript was completed, then I could go back and do more detail-focused editing passes, to clean up and improve sentences and paragraphs. I finally got to focus on the trees again instead of scanning the whole forest.

What about you? Do you have any strategies for developmental edits that work for you? Any difficult editing projects you’re working on?