Stephen King’s 10% Rule–does your 2nd draft follow it?
by Ruth Harris
Because: what you leave out is as important as what you put in.
I’m not saying the delete key is magic, but sometimes it can feel that way.
- Skillful use of the delete button will help you show instead of tell.
- Will add to the page-turning quality of your book.
- Will help create books readers stay up late to finish.
The delete button is the quickest, easiest way to transform your draft.
Less Is More and Feeling The Joy.
Mies van der Rohe’s famous dictum, Less Is More, applied to design and architecture.
Marie Kondo created a worldwide bestseller with advice on decluttering.
According to some of the world’s best writers, these two simple but powerful principles—less is more and decluttering—also apply to writing. Used judiciously, the modest, unassuming, reliable delete button is the fastest, easiest way to significantly improve your book—and maybe even change your life the way it changed Stephen King’s.
Other writers—like Elmore Leonard, Janet Evanovich, and John Grisham—agree and explain what you leave out is as important as what you put in.
Stephen King’s 10% Rule.
From Stephen King’s On Writing:
“In the spring of my senior year at Lisbon High—1966, this would have been—I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: “Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”
“I wish I could remember who wrote that note—Algis Budrys, perhaps. Whoever it was did me a hell of a favor. I copied the formula out on a piece of shirt-cardboard and taped it to the wall beside my typewriter. Good things started to happen for me shortly thereafter.”
Elmore Leonard Leaves Out The Parts Readers Skip.
“Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.”
“Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.”
“Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.”
To quote Elmore Leonard: “Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.”
James Patterson is a Master of the Minimal.
Patterson’s books, known for their short chapters and unputdownable quality, are driven by dialogue and action. Characters, setting, and emotion are conveyed in brief bursts.
Patterson advises: “If you want to keep up the pace, make sure you only give readers the barest details that add a bit of color, texture, and emotion.”
Janet Evanovich Compares Writing to Making Gravy.
In her book on craft, “How I Write,” Janet Evanovich says: “I work very hard at the mechanics of writing so the reader doesn’t have to work hard at all…I keep my books relatively short and I strongly believe in reduction writing. It’s like reduction in cooking When you make gravy, you take a big pot of ingredients—meat, spices—and you boil it down to a little pot of stuff, which is the essence.
“If you use that principle in writing you’re getting two terrific sentences rather than four long, tedious paragraphs. While my writing may give the impression of being simple and effortless, it actually takes me hours to get it to appear that way.”
John Grisham’s Do’s And Don’ts For Popular Fiction.
John Grisham is another popular writer who takes the less is more approach.
“Read each sentence at least three times in search of words to cut.”
“Most writers use too many words, and why not? We have unlimited space and few constraints.”
George Orwell Concurs.
“If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”
The Elements of Style by Strunk & White does, too.
“Omit needless words.”
Screenwriter William Goldman Takes a Scene-by-Scene Approach.
Obviously, novels are different than screenplays, but William Goldman’s observation that many scenes start too early and end too late is also relevant to novels.
“You always attack a movie scene as late as you possibly can. You always come into the scene at the last possible moment. Get on. The camera is relentless. Makes you keep running.”
English Author Esther Freud says “Editing is Everything.”
Named as one of the 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ by Granta magazine, Esther Freud advises writers to “cut until you can cut no more. What is left often springs into life.”
Award-Winning, Bestselling Welsh novelist, Sarah Waters also Wields the Delete Key.
“Cut like crazy. Less is more. I’ve often read manuscripts – including my own – where I’ve got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and thought: ‘This is where the novel should actually start.’
“A huge amount of information about character and back story can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it.”
How (And Where) to Start.
As in any criminal investigation, begin by rounding up the usual suspects.
Hunt down the cooties of language—adverbs, wandering sentences, meandering paragraphs, long descriptions, banal language, flat sentences—irritating, unneeded and unwanted.
But!
Before you start, duplicate the document you’re working on in case you get too carried away or change your mind later. If you’re on Scrivener, take a snapshot [Command-5] before you start pruning.
A no-brainer but crucially important. (Ask me how I know.)
F-words, Crutch Words and Other Perps.
Kathy Steinemann takes on filter words, lists offenders, kicks butt and offers rescues.
Diana Urban nails 43 words to cut. Period.
Jen Doll in The Atlantic goes mano a mano with an epidemic of crutch words.
Editor Hannah Baumann lists 40 words to avoid.
Why say “very beautiful”? “Beautiful” is enough, said James Joyce, hardly a miser when it came to words.
Here are 45 alternatives to “very.”
Editor Dave King offers a striking example of how deletions immediately strengthen a scene.
Blah, blah, blah—and more blah, blah, blah.
- Are you entertaining your reader?
- Informing your reader?
- Or are you dishing up a limp and lame word salad before you get down to the business of plot and chartacter?
- Are you boring your reader?
- Yourself?
- Have you asked yourself: Is this paragraph/scene/chapter really necessary?
- Are you drowning your story (and your reader) in lengthy descriptions or irrelevant digressions when s/he just wants to know who’s doing what to whom and what happens next?
- Is your book suffering from a dreaded case of info dump?
- If you’re not sure, look for dense thickets of prose and dumb dialogue.
- Can four sentences be condensed into two strong, vivid sentences? Are you making a mess? Or are you making gravy the way Janet Evanovich does?
- Should one long paragraph be two shorter paragraphs?
- And what about a one or two word paragraph to change the rhythm and get your reader’s attention?
Like this.
Navel gazing.
The character’s deep, philosophical thoughts about Life or The Search For Meaning and/or Identity? Only if you’re Plato or Nietzsche.
Often deleting the “why” a character does or says something will immediately strengthen your scene. The reader will fill in what you’ve purposely left out. Dialogue, setting, and body language will provide the necessary clues.
As Elmore Leonard said, “the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care.”
Warm ups.
Just as athletes leave the warm up on the practice field and shift into another gear when the game start, writers should consider William Goldman’s advice about when to enter and exit a scene.
- Is your scene starting too late?
- Have you been “setting the scene?”
- Describing the weather?
- Dithering on about the character’s identity crisis or inner psychological state?
- Explaining the crisis instead of showing it?
- Have you spent a few paragraphs “warming up” before the real action begins?
If so, you’ve found more to cut or even delete.
Reuse and recycle.
A good cook saves leftovers and knows how to repurpose them into appetizing meals. The left-over spinach that’s delicious added to a lentil soup? The odds and ends of meat and vegetables that appear again in a hearty shepherd’s pie?
Like a good cook, think of your deletions as leftovers that can be used another day.
Might a scene that ended up on the cutting room floor make a short story?
Can your odds and ends be used in a blog or newsletter to give your readers a peek behind the scenes?
Could a character that didn’t quite work be perfect in another book?
When the going gets tough, the tough delete.
Or at least they think about it, and so should you.
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Less is more… more often than not. I totally agree. I also believe that paring down your prose as much as humanly possible is an interesting rhetoric device. In fact, on those rare occurrences you feel you need to be a bit more expansive, your readers would be more willing to stick with you for a bit longer… Just a bit though =)
Peter—Excellent point about the times to be a bit more expansive. Readers need time to rest!
EXCELLENT ADVICE ABOUT CUTTING PROSE, PARING DOWN “IDEAS,” AND STICKING TO THE STORY, WHICH IS WHY THE READER IS READING.
SK FIGLER—Succinct and on point. Thanks!
I actually don’t agree, really with a lot of this. Things like cut 10%–or in my case, cut the first fifty pages, has writers second guessing if something is unnecessary and they end up cutting the voice out of the story. But I especially don’t agree with cutting the character description or setting. If I run into a writer who’s done that, I pass on it because I see that as a book that probably won’t have enough characterization for me. Since setting and characterizations are done through the character’s eyes, it’s the foundation for a lot of characterization. When Laurel K. Hamilton first did her Anita Blake series, one of the things I really liked was how the character described other characters. It was a hilarious look at how the main character thought.
Linda—Thanks for offering a different POV. 🙂
Excellent. In *Elements of Style* our friends Strunk & White agree — “Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, & sometimes nauseating.” Brava!
CS—Thanks! S&W nailed it! Especially love “unwholesome.” 😉
More than likely, I went seriously overboard with my descriptions. While it was good cannon fodder for blogging (what isn’t these days), it made for average writing overall.Took me a long time to be able to parse down my descriptive scenes w/o losing anything in the process. One of the things that helped ease the pain of this kind of editing was when I found myself skipping entire chapters of books ’cause the author felt the need to seriously elaborate (one such book, a vampire book set in the 1970’s, the author spent 25 pages of a chapter doing 7 different info dumps on the protagonist group).
Currently working on getting part 2 of my trilogy ready for the masses, I’ve making a serious effort in following the advice of the freelance editor i used on book one in regards to overuse of certain words (among other things) while I’m tidying things up. My current plague is reducing the amount of character name pronouns (i.e. Ray, Nikia) I’m using to the basic personal pronouns (he/she/him/her) in order to make things flow more smoothly.
G. B.—Learning to spot our own recurring flaws—and fixing them either by cutting or rephrasing—is crucial. I have to be on the lookout for compound sentences…a really bad habit. No one—least of all me—likes a cluttered room.
Good stuff, Ruth. Love your line, “When the going gets tough, the tough delete.” It reminds me of an old TV ad for some kind of spaghetti sauce with Eric Estrada (the beefcafe from CHIPS) who said, “It’s not how thick you make it – It’s how you make it thick.”
Garry—Thanks! Interesting, isn’t it, that you remember the beefcake dude and NOT the brand of spaghetti sauce? An example of bad advertising the client (the spaghetti sauce manufacturer) paid for.
I’m usually busy trying to add since I tend to skip a lot of description in the first draft. But there are a lot of adverbs, adjectives, and crutch words I cut. Some of those you’d think I would learn not to use over and over…
Alex—Thanks for pointing out that even when we “write short,” there’s opportunity for cutting. Janet Evanovich addresses this with the comment that “too short” can mean additional scenes/subplot must be added. Writers have to balance too much and too little in the search for “just right.” Not easy. No way!
I’ve always been an advocate of lean writing – sometimes too lean. But it’s easier to embellish later on than to try to part with your darlings after the fact. I’ve read a lot of books of late that really love to head hop, tell you everything every character is thinking, and then occasionally get back to the story itself. I suspect it is because the author wants to know the characters as much as she does so that the story is a rich experience. Only guessing though. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have that effect on me, it makes me want to sharpen my red pencil.Haha
That being said, I don’t think you can just do a blanket delete x percentage or number of pages. I think you have to find the balance that maintains the author voice, the character’s voice, and the story.
The one thing that always helped me in the ‘writing lean’ approach was Hemingway’s advice “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” For me, it is a great yardstick to use in policing your own writing.
Nice post, Ruth. Thanks.
Annie
writerchick—Thanks for the comment—and the Hemingway quote. I agree that finding the balance is the goal.
A blanket delete is not the point. I’m not suggesting taking an axe to our prose, but skillfully using a scalpel. Artful cuts/edits/deletions can make a big improvement—plus save the editor time while it saves us money.
Important to put the brain in gear before hitting the delete key!
Thanks Ruth. I think after this post I may have to go into hiding for awhile.
I mean, epic fantasy is the HOME, the nexus and cosmic epicenter of purple prose. No detail or description too small to focus on, every little thing that happens comes around to mean something four hundred pages later (when who, exactly, remembers?).
Of course one can go too far in the direction of page-turning also. Sometimes, when you’ve cut it until it can be cut no more, it doesn’t spring to life. Because you butchered it… and now the police want to have a word… But when I redraft and polish I certainly need to stay on the lookout for redundancy and passages that swirl into the sinkhole of needless-ness.
Will—Absolutely love your description of epic fantasy!
Purple prose has a long, “distinguished” history dating back to the era of the pulp novel when writers were paid by the word. Ergo: lots (and lots) of words.
Skillful cutting is the opposite of “butchering.” We’re not wielding hatchets, we’re polishing diamonds. (Actually, the best diamond experts are literally called “cutters.”)
Essential reading, Ruth, thanks. My lesson in cutting came when my publisher reduced the length of all their line to allow for larger fonts. Caught in the middle, I had to delete 10,000 words of my already-edited MSS. The first few thousand words were easy, the next lot tougher and the last couple of thousand like pulling teeth. Hints of description, back story and whiffs of research survived, the published book being 100% better for it.
PS How many of us are assiduously editing their posts? Asking for a friend.
valerieparv—Thanks for the great example!
“Hints” and “whiffs” draw the reader powerfully into the story, allowing him/her to fill in what the skillful writer has purposively left out. The reader thus becomes actively engaged rather than passively consuming.
I tend to find that when I read my work aloud, I naturally start wanting to skip over certain phrases or words. When I cut them out, it suddenly flows better!
Icy—Oooooh! Thanks for a great tip and a simple way to cut without angst.
It feels almost like magic, doesn’t it?, when a story starts to flow and characters come to life.
What I’d like to see deleted are most of the foul language and blasphemies that appear in many novels. I know the argument is that ‘this is how people speak’ and I know some do, but if we’re happy to cut out words that serve little purpose in a paragraph, why are we so keen to include words that of themselves are boring, and annoying and actually convey very little?
Surely good writers can manage without them – I know a number who do. If you must use expletives, save for the some vital moment, when they have an effect.
mcrowl2014—Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Profanity (or anything) becomes dulled by repetition. A good writer must know when—and where—to say what. Ditto cable TV’s overuse of profanity.
And I live in NYC, cursing capital of the country! lol
Creating 500 words for a workshop this moment. Very helpful, THANKS.
elizabethhavey—Thank *you!” Make your 500 words count! Cutting the blubber, the wimpy words, the trite phrases is key.
Don’t forget that slogans and ads are super short—usually 3-5 words at most—and EXTREMELY powerful.
Good luck with your 500 words! We can say a lot in 500 words. It’s the writers’ secret power. 😉
This is great. I can relate to this because I tend to be short on description of places and people, putting in just enough so the reader can picture in her mind’s eye where things are happening and what the people look like. I think the “take out what the reader glosses over” is so, so true. I know what I skim through when I read a book and I wish it weren’t there! Thank you for this.
Patricia—thanks! What the reader fills in will also make the book more personal. An important plus!
Ooooh! F-words, Crutch Words and Other Perps—what a treasure. Thank you!
Maureen—Yep! The usual suspects. We have to hunt them down every time, the little devils. 🙂
Ten percent??? I was thought the twenty percent rule. It is ruthless but makes writing tighter. One reason I go crazy with the first draft is because I know I can fix and shorten on the next draft.
Another great teaching post, Anne!
Ingmarhek—Hi, I’m Ruth but Anne writes even better posts! 😉 glad you enjoyed it.
20% works for me. Depends where you start and what you have to work with!
Ingmar–Not true. Ruth’s posts are some of our most popular. But yes, Ruth wrote this one!
This says everything I’ve been trying to explain to my U3A reading group about reducing verbiage – and from somebody other then me. Lots of Somebodies!
Thanks
Cathy—Yes! Those Somebodies are not Nobodies, are they? And they do tend to know what they’re talking about!
Thank *you*!
Great useful information.
Fenlandphil—Thanks. Appreciated!
I enjoy leaving out the parts that readers will enjoy filling in more than they’ll enjoy reading. Gaps are essential to fiction. We want the reader to have breaks, and we have limited page space, even in big novels.
John—Great observation! Thanks for making the excellent point about readers needing a break. Pace is crucial and a well chosen gap does the job,
Excellent article ladies. Less is more. Bookmarked this to add to my next ‘Writer’s Tips’ when I return from my winter escape. 🙂
Hello and thanks, Ruth! You started my week off with the first reminder of trimming the fat — a day later, I welcomed another fav blog that tackled the idea that sometimes it’s okay to ‘quit’. Both wonderful posts had to do with letting go, essentially…and were great reminders.
With your post though, I love the idea of starting with a specific goal in mind — that you just gotta get rid of 10% of the excess. And there always IS excess!
I try to incorporate the location of a scene with the action and interaction of characters. Grossing out over a cobweb to the face will mean much more to me, as the reader, than reading about all the cobwebs in the creepy, dank basement.
At the same time, I don’t want to cut out things that are important, like what day it is, what time of day, what time of year, the weather — little bits that set up sweat and rain-soaked hair and full churches and a sunrise or sunset, etc. Like someone mentioned, I’d rather encounter information as the character observes it.
Loved all the who’s who examples, especially William Goldman — plus all the look-here links! And though I don’t have one to train right now (thank the gods), have already ordered your book.
Thanks for the bright spot in a dreary day (cold and cloudy)
Maria D’Marco
Maria—Thanks! When/if you have one to train, at least you’ll know what to do. lol
The point of cutting the inessential is to make the important things even more prominent and powerful. As you say, the cobweb to the face is immediate, personal. Yuck!
This is where being a former comedy writer can help. We spend ages stressing over every single word in a monologue or sketch. I am definitely on the lean side when writing fiction, focusing on dialogue and action, just like I did in the comedy days. This was an excellent post, Ruth. One of the best.
Melodie—Thanks for the flattering words and for pointing out the parallel to comedy writing. A good punch line matters in comedy—and in fiction.
I recall that Joan Rivers had thousands of jokes written down on index cards, filed and alphabetized. I wonder what’s happened to her files.
Also recall that Jerry Seinfeld wrote and revised his jokes on legal pads. Took him lots of time and effort to find out which ones worked and which ones didn’t.
It’s all about the writing, isn’t it?
What a trove of things to think about, thanks! I must block out four hours, soon, to click on all those links, one by one.
alainrichard64 — Thank you for your kind words. Hope you will consider your four hours well spent! 🙂
A very helpful post. TY
Rae—Thank you for taking the time to comment. Happy to hear the post was of help. 🙂
Thank you so much for this amazing info! I want to write a post about certain things that are, I think, improving my writing. Not from an expert point of view but from the point of view of someone learning the craft. I’d like to link back to this post. Hope that’s okay.
Tanya—Thanks for the kind words. Pleased to learn the post resonated! Anne and I appreciate the link. 🙂
I turned a 300,000 + word story into two novels of about 97,000 words. In March I did sell almost 3,000 of those cut words as a short story. My novels so far have been adequately lean. But now I’m working on a fantasy series and I find myself trying to “un-lean” the prose. I must constantly remind myself that I have room to expand the story.
Fred—Thanks for sharing your creative use of those 300K words. Don’t forget, Stephen King writes his share of doorstopper fiction and, of course, fantasy does go long. Good luck on your un-leaning process!