12 Ways To Shorten Your Short Story

Do you need to cut your short story’s word count? Learn 12 ways to tighten your writing, polish your story, and make every word matter.

In our 12 Short Stories Challenge, the word count is specific for each prompt. I have been challenging you with a different word count for each month. We have written 500-word stories and we have written 2500-word stories.

I have set a further challenge for you to write to the exact number of words. There is a lot of controversy around this, but I want you to truly evaluate each word. I want you to examine your writing and decide what to do to reduce or increase the length of your story.

12 Ways To Shorten Your Short Story

I have created a list of things to do to shorten your story. I want to remind you that this is second draft stuff. In the first draft you will simply write, forget about the rules, the word count, and write until you know what your story is about. Once you know that, write your short story.

Hint: If your short story is about 10 000 words you may have a tough time reducing it to 750 words. It is not impossible, but you might want to re-evaluate your execution or subject matter. This advice varies along with the length of your story.

Reduce your word count in two ways:

Your Writing

You can make structural changes to your writing that will reduce your word count:

1. Cut unnecessary adverbs. These are usually the –ly words. Replace them with strong verbs.
2. Cut most adjectives. Sometimes we describe something for the sake of it. Make sure that description is necessary.
3. Strengthen descriptions. By using strong nouns and verbs we can reduce the length of a description and increase the impact of that description.
4. Use contractions. This is a simple cheat that can cut a word or two if you need to be exact. Make sure it doesn’t mess with your pacing though.
5. Remove conjunctions. Have you varied the length of your sentences?  Long sentences use many conjunctions and we can cut them when we reduce and vary the length of our sentences.
6. Cut unnecessary words. Does the omission of a word change the meaning of the sentence? If not, cut it. Words like ‘that’, ‘the’, ‘like’, ‘pretty’, and ‘very’ don’t add to the meaning or can be replaced by stronger words.

Your Story

And then, you need to make changes to your stories to reduce your word count:

1. Reduce scenes. Are you including backstory or explaining your character’s behaviour in a scene that can be summed up in a line of dialogue?
2. Reduce characters. Does your character need a BFF, a therapist, and a patient barman to lend an ear? One of those should do the trick.
3. Reduce settings. Each of these characters mentioned above usually comes with a setting of their own. Reduce the character and the setting and you will save words on unnecessary descriptions.
4. Cut your sub-plot. Short stories rarely have time or space for a sub-plot.
5. Show, don’t tell. Change interior thought to action or dialogue.
6. Reduce the scope or timeframe of your story. A lifetime is easier to fit into a longer story and a moment is easier to use for a shorter story.

The Last Word

Short stories need to make every word count. If your story is too long, these 12 tips will help you cut unnecessary words, scenes, characters, and sub-plots without losing the essence of your story. The goal is not simply to make your story shorter, but to make it tighter and more powerful. Happy writing.

P.S. Remember to join the 12 Short Stories challenge, and if you want to learn how to write a short story, sign up for our online course.

Image by Leopictures from Pixabay

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