Tightening Your Prose: Part 2

Removing filler words and actions

This was the second draft of Truthwitch, and it was still…25,000 words longer than what my editor wanted. So out came the very vicious red pen, and I managed to cut it down to 120,000 words before I turned it in again!

I am back this week to pick up where I left off in the last newsletter about Tightening Your Prose. I talked about eliminating redundancies and closing your scene “circles” in that post, and today we’ll wrap up with a focus on two things:

1. Filler actions.

2. Filler dialogue tags.

And, as a bonus, I’m going to talk about one of my most favorite (I mean favorite, favorite, favorite) literary tools: slowing time.

Let’s get started!