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As I wrapped up line edits on THE PERFECT HOME, I couldn’t help but notice what happened to the word count since the submission draft:

The word count went up by ~300 words.

This might seem counterintuitive to some. Editing is a “cutting” exercise, right? Snip off the unclean edges. Burn off the excess. “Kill your darlings,” as Stephen King says. So how did the manuscript get longer if we successfully cut out the portions that weren’t working?

The answer, quoting Erica Schneider, is that editing is not exclusively a cutting exercise. It’s a value-adding exercise.

Or, as Nathan Baugh recently put it:

If all you ever do is cut, cut, cut, you might end up sounding like Kevin from The Office.

Erica notes that there are tons of ways to add value in an edit. Cutting fluff is one of them. You’re doing your readers a favor if you don’t waste their time. But you can also:

• Add load-bearing sentences for flow

• Fill in essential context the reader is missing

• Develop an interesting idea

• Provide missing examples

Erica primarily writes nonfiction and Nathan primarily writes fiction, but the idea is the same:

A good edit shouldn’t just cut. It should develop your underbaked ideas.

In the case of THE PERFECT HOME, my first edit from Sabrina did come back with suggestions for passages to cut. I think it lost ~3,000 words, approximately a chapter’s worth of content. But there were also suggestions for development.

• Could I add more to this scene, maybe fully explain why that protagonist’s relationship exists?

• Could I set up a later twist with a few more “seeds” earlier in the manuscript?

• Could I, in other words, add value?

Cutting is simple. And it’s easy once you get the hang of it. (My suggestion is to keep a file of “unused words” so you never feel like your cut passages are dissolving into the void. They’re easier to part with that way. And you know what? Even though I tell myself I can bring these lost words back eventually, deleted stuff usually stays deleted.)

But what about the tough part of fiction editing: the value-adding?

You have a lot of options here.

Good Add #1: Essential Context or Development

By itself, a haircut isn’t a particularly interesting story beat.

Let’s say that J.K. Rowling had included this detail without any further development:

Good characterization, of course. Harry is the underdog. I’d argue these are already strong, worthy details. But on its own, you can probably imagine someone in an writing critique group arguing that the paragraph DoEsN’T mOvE thE sToRy FoRWaRd.

Except J.K. Rowling doesn’t let that detail exist in a vacuum. It’s here for a reason. Watch how she develops it in the very next sentence:

Aha. Magic. We’ve added a critical detail that develops the central mystery of Harry’s hidden powers. Now it’s impossible to cut the haircut from the manuscript and improve it. Rowling has made it a load-bearing detail:

• Aunt Petunia’s control over Harry

• Dudley’s mockery, making Harry the underdog

• The fun element: the mystery of the returning hair and Harry Potter’s magic

If you add context that deepens the mystery of your plot, you’ve cemented the scene’s value. Ditching the haircut is officially a bad idea.

Good Add #2: Add a Flavor of “Ice Cream”

Good characters make your book as fun as browsing a menu at Baskin Robbins. 31 flavors!!!

And flavors don’t exist until you add something to the cream.

Take Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, which opens with Joyce’s unmistakeable voice:

On its surface, the details in bold might be “unnecessary.” Does it have to be a Monday? Does it have to be Shepherd’s Pie? And you could argue that Joyce’s “telly” detail about her memory seems like an unnecessary add-on, too. An amateur critic might say: wHy iNtRoDuCe thAt dOuBt? ShOw DoN’T tELl.

Well, because Joyce is an elderly woman, Joyce is funny to read, and the contrast between her lax memory and the startling details of the preceding paragraph (“a question about knife wounds, if it wasn’t inconvenient?”) are a witty combination.

Joyce doesn’t have to interject about her memory lapses, does she? We don’t have to know that they eat Shepherd’s Pie on Mondays. Yet this opening is better for it. A big portion of what makes The Thursday Murder Club special is the murder mystery set against the backdrop of elderly citizen-sleuths.

It’s basically the whole point of reading for pleasure.

Good Add #3: Setting Up the Payoff

Sometimes an editor will have you go in and add a lil’ somethin-somethin when you need to “seed” future events. That way, when a character pulls Chekhov’s gun off the wall, you’ve established its existence.

Here’s an example early on in Stephen King’s The Shining, when Watson is giving Jack Torrance a breakdown of the hotel’s heating systems:

This scene—full of exposition about Jack’s boiler duties—might seem like it’s full of mundane details. But imagine if King waited until the third act to explain about the boiler pressure problem. “Oh, by the way, there are potential problems with the hotel’s old heating system.” Readers would say: what the heck, man? Where did that come from?

But thanks to little moments like the-goose-just-walked-over-my-grave, there’s tension throughout the entire book. What happens if someone’s not there to release the pressure?

If this detail hadn’t appeared in the first draft, an editor might ask to go back and put it in.

Words added, yes.

But value added, too.

🖋️Writing Tip: Start the story in the middle of something moving🖋️

To capture attention, start your story with momentum already in full swing.

Here are some classic ways not to do that:

• The main character is waking up or having breakfast

• You start with a time or date rather than a more relevant detail

• Starting a scene with something in every person’s routine: a bath, a shower, brushing teeth, etc.

Fast-forward to the important part of the scene. Where is the motion in which the story elevates from routine into something unusual?

You can always drop in context, setting, and exposition later.

One of the best edits of the original Star Wars was cutting Luke’s early exposition scenes. They were ruining the momentum of an exciting opening act. In the final cut, Luke only shows up on-screen when he meets the story already-in-progress: encountering C-3PO and R2-D2.

(Scenes: cut. Value: added.)

But you don’t have to wait until the second draft to do this. Just start doing it. Here’s bestselling author Barbara O’Neal starting an average scene:

The scene disturbance is the phone ringing. In one sentence, we have a tiny dilemma. The character wants something (to answer the phone) and has an obstacle (just got in the bath).

O’Neal still has a checklist to run through: describing her character’s state of mind, the setting in the bathroom, etc.

But imagine if she started the scene with those details. “I was taking a bath. The room smelled of lavender oil.”

Nice enough. But there’d be no tension.

The smarter play is to start with the tension of phone-ringing-but-oh-no-I’m-in-the-tub. Then O’Neal lets us linger on that beat while she sets the scene.

Here’s freelance writer Kat Boogaard doing exactly that with a nonfiction piece:

But let’s zoom out.

What if you’re writing a screenplay or a novel? Where do you begin the whole story?

Find the momentum that sets the stage. Here are some beginnings to famous stories. Notice they all start with momentum establishing what we’re about to experience:

• In Star Wars, a spaceship is fleeing from a Star Destroyer

• In Fight Club, Tyler Durden has a gun in the narrator’s mouth

• In Jaws, a shark is in the water and an unfortunate victim is out for a night swim

Star Wars could have begun with a dialogue exposition scene. Fight Club could have begun with the Narrator’s discourse on late 20th-century discontentment. Jaws could have begun with exposition about the setting, Amity Island.

BOOOOORRRRRIIIIINNNGGGGG.

Starting in the middle of things is so effective, it’s even earned cliche status. You’ve seen the old meme of the freeze-frame and the record-scratch?

Sure, you can do flash-forwards wrong, and people do. But most cliches earn their cliche status because they’re effective.

Fast-forward to the good part. Fill in details as you go.

Thanks for reading my newsletter!

As you can probably tell, the status of THE PERFECT HOME is: edits nearly done. If the manuscript were a plane on descent, the runway is visible.

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Until next time,

-DK