How to shorten a short story

Writing Desk Archive
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so, im entering this ‘contest’ sort of thing for an adopt, where you have to write a short story

the work limit is 1k words

I am currently at 1040 words

and I haven’t even written part 3 yet

help-

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Do the opposite of what you do when u have a 2000 word essay

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sourcehttps://www.writerswrite.co.za/12-secrets-to-shorten-your-short-story

12 tips to shorten your story

Your writing

You can make structural changes to your writing that will reduce your word count:

  1. Cut unnecessary adverbs . These are usually the –ly words. Replace them with strong verbs.
  2. Cut most adjectives . Sometimes we describe something for the sake of it. Make sure that description is necessary.
  3. Strengthen descriptions . By using strong nouns and verbs we can reduce the length of a description and increase the impact of that description.
  4. Use contractions . This is a simple cheat that can cut a word or two if you need to be exact. Make sure it doesn’t mess with your pacing though.
  5. Remove conjunctions . Have you varied the length of your sentences? Long sentences use many conjunctions and we can cut them when we reduce and vary the length of our sentences.
  6. Cut unnecessary words. Does the omission of a word change the meaning of the sentence? If not, cut it. Words like that, the, like, pretty, very don’t add to the meaning or can be replaced by stronger words.

Story

  1. Reduce scenes . Are you including backstory or explaining your character’s behaviour in a scene that can be summed up in a line of dialogue?
  2. Reduce characters . Does your character need a BFF, a therapist, and a patient barman to lend an ear? One of those should do the trick.
  3. Reduce settings . Each of these characters mentioned above usually comes with a setting of their own. Reduce the character and the setting and you will save words on unnecessary descriptions.
  4. Cut your subplot . Short stories rarely have time or space for a subplot.
  5. Show, don’t tell . Change interior thought to action or dialogue.
  6. Reduce the scope or timeframe of your story . A lifetime is easier to fit into a longer story and a moment is easier to use for a shorter story.
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Did you enter the contest, @phnx? How did it go?

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Added some tagss

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Late but

I did enter it, and I got 2nd place ^^

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Second. That’s awesome. Congrats

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Closed due to inactivity and the contest being well-over.