It’s Time to Go on a Diet - Writing Tighter and Making Your Manuscript Lean

Every year, in the dead of winter, several people across the English-speaking world come up with long-term and short-term plans to trim the fat. Armed with newly made resolutions, weight-loss fads, and sheer will-power, they head to the gym and the produce sections with the best of intentions. Then, by the end of winter, most of their plans have been thwarted by football celebrations, Mardis Gras and Valentine’s Day. Still, they vow… there’s always next year.

What if I told you I knew of a plan which would keep it slim, tight, and… less wordy?

Wait, what?

You thought we were talking about fat of the flesh? Well… I was, but now I am talking about your manuscript. It’s fat, and it needs to go on a diet.

What kind of diet? The Word Loss Diet (link the title to the book on Amazon).

The Word Loss Diet is a short, how-to, book. Written by Rayne Hall, it goes through, step by step, on how to cut unnecessary wordiness in your written piece. To be honest, Hall writes a lot of great books that help with both writing and self-editing. I highly recommend you check out her Writer’s Craft series.

What does The Word Loss Diet say to do?

1. There are thirteen specific tips highlighted throughout the book. Each come with its own set of examples and exceptions. As well as offering helpful advice, Ms. Hall also outlines instructions on how to efficiently achieve results in your word processing software.

2. Tips range from simple word replacement/rephrasing to pacing dialog to tightening your plot. She covers a lot of bases, and, not for nothing, these bases are some of the hardest when it comes to self-editing.

3. At the end she provides samples from her own fiction writing to demonstrate what tight manuscript writing should look like.

What are WE going to cover in this specific blog? We will NOT be covering all thirteen tips, but I will share my favorite five:

1. Start to Begin, and Turn to Look

Technically, this is two tips in one, but because they both cover the issue of cutting unneeded phrases from your book, I’m combining them.

Cut out the phrases “start to” and “begin to.”

“If something happens, you don’t need to tell the reader that it starts to happen. Just let it happen.” Rayne Hall – The Word Loss Diet

Using these phrases is a rookie mistake, but even veteran writers can fall into this lazy habit. At the end of the day, your writing is tighter without these phrases, so lose them.

2. Kill them Dead

Or as I like to say, repetitive redundancies. I’ve, personally, seen manuscripts where entire paragraphs were repeating the same sentiment with different words. The writer can feel deflated when I tell them to bring the entire thing into one, well worded, tightly written sentence. It’s worth it in the end to have a well told story without beating the reader over the head again and again about the same thing. When it’s done, they agree.

Ms. Hall, however, narrows down these redundancies to phrases and sentences. As you’re self-editing, you should probably stick to this simple form of correction, as well. Let an outside editor look for bigger picture redundancies.

“When you say the same thing twice with different words, it’s a ‘tautology.’ Tautologies make a manuscript wordy.” Rayne Hall – The Word Loss Diet

Examples (from the book):

Cold chill little baby young teenager old crone tall giant

She gives more examples, but I think you get the hint. A chill indicates it’s cold. A baby is automatically little. Teenagers are young. You don’t need to surround these words with other words whose meanings are implicit.

3. Wonderings and Ponderings

You don’t need to tell your audience what your POV character is feeling, thinking, understanding. These things are assumed, because your POV character is telling the story. Therefore, your readers assume the thoughts of the character based on how the character is telling the story.

If your main character is in a sticky predicament, you don’t need to say she realizes the situation she’s in. Just stating the situation is enough.

Example from The Word Loss Diet:

Rough Draft: “She realized she was trapped.”

After Word Loss Diet: “She was trapped.”

“If the point of view is established, you can state the thoughts and feelings without saying that the PoV thought them and felt them.” Rayne Hall – The Word Loss Diet

4. Snappy Dialog

This is one of the chapters where Ms. Hall explains, right away, that this phase of the diet takes a little longer and requires more thought than some of the other chapters.

Dialog is one of my favorite things to write, because, in my opinion, it’s the best way to show instead of telling. You can reveal plot twists, give insights into characters, and set the pace of the story through well written dialog.

Rayne Hall says, “The fewer the words, the snappier the dialog.”

Why do you want snappy dialog? Wait. What IS snappy dialog?

Snappy dialog is tight dialog. It gets to the point. It doesn’t beat around the bush. Ms. Hall gives the advice of NOT writing dialog in a way that reflects how people actually speak. Rather, a character appears more confident and intelligent if they use fewer words.

In short, spend some time with your characters and review how they speak to one another. Trim down the language and have them be more direct… that is, unless, you’re wanting a specific character to come off as a bumbling idiot. In that case throw a lot of “like,” “um,” and “really” into their speech patterns.

To your readers, it will dumb them down.

5. The Sigh

The chapter in the book is titled “He Sighs, She Sighs, Everybody Sighs.” Ms. Hall points out that people who sigh a lot in real life can become annoying. I couldn’t agree more. I tend to keep it to myself, but one of my biggest pet peeves is the passive aggressive constant sigher. If you have something to say, just say it, already! So, she points out, it’s no wonder when readers have the same negative reaction to a character who sighs a lot.

If your character, especially a main character, sighs throughout your book, you need to get in there and fix that, stat.

Ms. Hall goes on further to point out that characters who sigh at the “slightest trigger” come off as weak and ill prepared. Or, in her words, a “wuss.”

If you don’t want your audience to lose respect for your characters, don’t let them sigh. Only let the weaker, minor characters sigh. Even then, only have them do it once or twice in the entire novel.

I’ve shared with you my top five favorite pieces of advice for self-editing. These tips, plus the ones outlined in The Word Loss Diet by Rayne Hall, will get your manuscript toned and slimmed down just in time for bathing suit season… I mean publication.