Getting writing right isn’t easy. Editing is tough. Telling stories requires patience and whittling words down to the barest minimum, all while turning your dialogue into something people want to read. The trick is balancing all of it, cutting only what’s not needed, and sharing your creativity and passion one word at a time.

It’s that last bit I struggled with. Then I actually had to live into it, cutting 16,000 words from my book.

The idea came pouring out of me, like water gushing from a fire hose. Five weeks. Thirty-four chapters. Some of those days I’d write more than 6,000 words. Other days it was dumb luck if I could get 300. The thing is, the ideas came so fast and I loved crafting each sentence while I was writing it. That should’ve been my first warning. Then I sat down at my keyboard, prepared to strip sixteen thousand of my beloved words. What I found out? How much I loved storytelling wasn’t for the reader only. It was really all for me.

Early in the novel Natalie is sitting with numbers that don’t add up, running it through her mind over and over, like a film projector caught in a never-ending loop. Natalie had four paragraphs of internal monologue. Each paragraph defended my thesis, showed how much I understood what Natalie wanted and needed. How much I knew, and how badly I wanted you to know I knew it. I wrote it all, reading it out loud to myself three weeks later, hearing exactly what it was: me, telling the reader what to do instead of letting my reader experience what Natalie was going through. The cardinal sin of writing. Telling instead of showing.

Four paragraphs got cut to a meager six lines. After I got out of the way, the scene did what it always needed to.

So that’s my confession. Editing isn’t so much about words as it is about ego, and how much of it you’re willing to let go of on any given page. Every sentence you kill is your small admission, permission so to speak, that you have nothing to prove — that the reader was trusting you this far, all without the extra scaffolding. So let them.

Show up, pay attention, get out of the way — it sounds like my life. I said it to myself in a hospital hallway once, not knowing what else to offer. I’ve said it in parking lots after conversations that ran long past when either of us meant to leave. I never thought I’d have to apply it to my own paragraphs. But there it is. The instinct to over explain, underline, to make absolutely sure the reader gets it — that’s the same instinct that makes me over-narrate my own presence with people who don’t need my commentary.

They just need me.

So now I cut like a butcher carving a beautiful piece of steak. I ask myself about each line: are you doing something? Or are you pointing at me, showing the reader I’m here? Dialogue survives if your characters can’t say it any other way. A hand gesture survives the cut — as long as it costs the character. Everything else goes.

Six thousand words left to let go.