How to shorten your manuscript
5 ways to cut your story down to size.
An author we know was offered a contract for her novel on the condition that she cut down the length from 600 manuscript pages down to 450. Most manuscripts can do with a little pruning; see our post how long is a story. But shortening the text by a quarter is a tall order.
Here’s some advice we were able to give her.
1. Remove backstory.
Many authors tend to tell too much about their heroine’s origins or childhood in the first couple of chapters. They think that the readers need to know where the character comes from or how the protagonist grew up in order to understand her properly. Actually, this is a fallacy. It can be counterproductive to explain too much about a main character for two reasons:
- Because making that character’s background specific removes the chance for the readers to identify with the character. An everyman type of character, someone blank (at least initially), can make it easier for the readers to put themselves in their shoes.
- Because readers like mystery. The audience does not want to be spoon-fed but likes to work things out for themselves. Characters that do strange things are fascinating, and the things they do appear strange mostly because we don’t (yet) understand their motivations. If we know everything already, understand their conscious and subconscious desires and needs, then that explains everything they do before they even do it, so there is less chance for them to surprise us.
