Cutting Your Novel Down to Its Essential Components

The bravest thing you can do in your writing is cutting your novel down to its essential components.

Be Like Michelangelo and Remove Everything That is Not Your Book.

Killing your darlings. Editing. Revising. Outlining. Proofreading. These are the things you do when you’re cutting your novel down to its essential components. It’s a painful time, where you’re asking yourself questions that are painful to ask—Do I really have to get rid of Jackson Layton? He’s Miranda’s lover, and he’s such a strong character? Is Detective Rines’s subplot, where he searches for the child that may or may not be his, add anything—at all—to the main plot, the one where Chief Superintendent Porter investigates Homicide Detective McCallister, who also happens to be his wife? Is the scene where Marcus Tredley confronts the King of England something that might happen, or would someone of Tredley’s stature even be able to get into the same room as the king? It’s possible, of course. But is it probable? And more importantly, is it necessary to effectively tell your story?

You must ask these and a million other questions when writing and revising your novel. Revision, rewriting, and sculpting your novel are what writing is about. The first draft of your novel is where you’re exploring (unless you’re someone who outlines everything from the beginning, but you’re still exploring even after that process, at least to an extent). But once you have your first draft and have a semi-decent picture of what your novel is about, the tough work begins. The great artist Michelangelo said, “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work . . . I just remove everything that is not David.” The same is true when writing a novel. Once you have your first draft, it’s time to remove everything that’s not your novel. Yes, you do add things to your novel—new scenes, perhaps new plot lines, new characters, dialogue, etc. But what you’re doing is enhancing what already exists—the story you set out to write. And this means putting in the work to understand what doesn’t need to be there.

I once had a novel that I had done thousands of hours of research for—watching movies, documentaries, interviews, reading books and magazines and listening to audio recordings of events that had taken place during the years of The Troubles in Northern Ireland (also known as the Northern Ireland Conflict), which lasted approximately from the 1960s until 1998. I met and spoke with the late John Hume, an Irish nationalist politician in Northern Ireland and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. We spoke about the decommissioning of arms by the IRA and what that would ultimately mean for Catholics and Protestants, The Belfast Agreement or Good Friday Agreement, which was signed on April 10, 1998, but that would not take effect until years later, as the Provisional Irish Republican Army was hesitant to disarm. At any rate, even after all of that research, both secondary and primary research, I had to make decisions based on what worked for my fiction versus what wasn’t going to work. And let me tell you, I had some wonderful scenes that were, I believe, very compelling, yet ultimately didn’t make the cut. My novel turned into something else—primarily a story about a family whose sons become members of other resistance organizations, in particular ETA, the Basque Country Separatists and GAL, the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación, or "Antiterrorist Liberation Groups." I may return to the IRA research I did for another novel, but it wasn’t information I was going to use for this one.

As writers, we dive deep—into our emotions, into the research we conduct so that we get every detail correct, every accent right, and that we pull from our readers the emotions within them that will keep them interested and thus keep them reading. To do that, we must focus on the book we’re trying to write. We need to understand that we have a central character that wants something and who goes after it, despite opposition. She never stops seeking what she wants, no matter what gets in her way. And we never stop seeking what we want, i.e., a work of fiction that works from the beginning through the middle, all the way until the last word of our book. We have our main plot, perhaps a subplot or subplots that contribute, ideally, to the main plot, and if anything at all can be plucked away so that our book gets down to the basics, to the core of our story, without added fluff or scenes, characters or settings or whatever, that’s what we do. That’s our job as writers. So put aside the idea that you must use everything that you’ve written. The fact of the matter is that if you’re keeping everything you wrote from your first draft, it’s probably a mistake. So experiment. Do something you wouldn’t ordinarily do. If you’re able to question why a character is in the story, take her out. Does it improve the story? Yes? Then maybe keep her out. Do you have a subplot in the novel that you like? What happens if you remove it? Does it damage the main plot? No? Kick it to the curb. Your job is to try different things that you feel may improve your work. Don’t fall in love with anything.

As writers, we dive deep—into our emotions, into the research we conduct so that we get every detail correct, every accent right, and that we pull from our readers the emotions within them that will keep them interested and thus keep them reading.

I want you to write the novel you want to read. I want you to be fearless. I want you to understand that we all struggle with our writing. Every single writer out there does. Some of us may write faster than others. Some of us may edit longer than others. A lot longer. That doesn’t mean anything. You do you. There is no magic formula to writing. Everyone is different. Check out when your favorite authors’ books are published. If they have a book out once a year, super. But there are some writers that haven’t published a book in over a decade. Does that mean they’re not writers? Or not productive writers? Nope. Perhaps their process is different than yours. I know I write very quickly when it comes to first drafts but then edit for years. Literally. It takes me that long to figure out what needs to stay and what needs to go. And I’m okay with that. You need to figure out what you’re trying to achieve. Question everything. And never, ever be afraid to take risks with what you take out and what you keep. You never know when that magic move will arrive, be it an addition, a subtraction, or even a slight edit. Like Nike says, Just Do It!

Cully Perlman is a novelist, blogger, and Substantive Editor. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com