Learn to Write: How To Cut Unnecessary Words
Practical Class in Editing Your Writing for Children
Jan 2, 2009
Nothing slows down your writing more than unnecessary words. This lesson will teach you two ways to avoid the pitfalls of overloaded and clumsy writing.
- There is no need to describe every moment of the action. Read this example of too much action.
Maya woke up in the armchair as the doorbell rang. She was still half asleep, but she got up and walked across the room and down the passage to the wooden front door. She turned the brass handle and opened the heavy carved door to find a little tiny pixie standing smiling on the doorstep.
Maya jumped in surprise, her face changing from sleepy to amazed in one swift moment, before an expression of disdain and rage swept across her petite features.
A good edit speeds up the narrative to the point where the action really starts.
Maya was asleep in the armchair when the doorbell woke her. Still half asleep, she stumbled down the passage and opened the door. A tiny pixie grinned on the doorstep. Maya was furious as she realized who it was.
- Too much detail can clog up the writing, particularly if it is all introduced at once.
Once upon a time a poor woman named Ling lived in a city in China. She was a widow – her husband had died while she was expecting her first baby. He drowned when his boat capsized in the river during a freak storm.
She didn’t exactly live in the city, but rather in a hovel outside the city gates, in a poor neighbourhood. Everyone who lived near by was as poor as she was. It was a hard life. Her only consolation was her only son, who was now about fourteen years old. He was the light of her life, because he reminded her of her long lost husband. The boy’s name was Aladdin, though she called him Al mostly.
Simplify the text, and it becomes elegant and fast moving, pushing the readers into the story rather than holding them back.
“There was once a poor widow in China who had an only son called Aladdin. The two lived in a small house outside a great city.” (Tales from the Arabian Nights as told by Lee Wyndham; Whitman Publishing Company Racine Wisconsin; 1965)
Editing Makes all the Difference
- Trimming unnecessary details and
- Cutting out those steps of the action not essential to the plot will bring your writing alive.
Want to practice cutting unnecessary words? You will find exercises to hone your skill at Writing Exercises in Cutting Unnecessary Action.
Cutting superfluous text is just one kind of editing. For really polished work writers need to know how to do all the steps of a thorough edit. You can read about the three basic kinds of editing in Editing your Novel for Children.
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