Something that I have heard lots of writers talking about is shaving hundreds, maybe even thousands of words from their first drafts.  Now maybe this is something that I wont experience until I’ve got another novel written or I have something being considered by an editor, but up until now I’ve never gone over a work of mine to just cut words out.  It just feels like an alien concept to me as where I am now as a writer it feels like most of what I write does serve a purpose to the story.  I know edits need to be made ot first drafts but I rarely look to reduce the overall word count.

In the original draft of Project Phoenix there is a lot of dead words that would need cutting.  If I remember correctly Project Phoenix topped out at about 106,000 words and we knew with that draft we would need to cut it down to about 70-80, 000 words but before we started we realised that it was, well crap to be honest, which is why it will be re-written when me and Owen have a little more experience.

So a question that I would like to pose here is this: if I write a novel do I need to aim to write about, lets say 20,000 words more then the novel actually needs?  If its a 80, 000 word story do I need to write a 100,000 word story and that 20%?  Or is it a case that I’ll need to cut, or maybe add words to suit the publishers idea of how many pages are needed?