How to Fix a Novel That’s Too Long (Without Losing the Story)

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If your first draft came in at 140,000 words and every piece of advice you’ve found amounts to “cut your adverbs,” this video is for you. Because your novel isn’t too long. It’s too long in the wrong places, and that’s why your last editing session moved the word count by only four thousand and still fixed nothing.

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So in this video I’m breaking down how to fix a novel that’s too long, in five specific categories you can actually act on. I cover structural bloat and how to cut scenes that don’t earn their page count, the “enter late, leave early” principle stolen from screenwriting, how to bury your worldbuilding and research instead of displaying it, the redundancy you literally cannot see in your own manuscript, and the sunk cost fallacy that’s stopping you from cutting the scene you already know needs to go.

I also cover what agents actually mean when they reject on word count (it’s not the number), why “kill your darlings” is bad advice for overwriters specifically, and the exact order to do your revision in, because doing it backwards is why most writers give up halfway through.

Whether you’re writing epic fantasy, romantasy, or any kind of fiction that’s ballooned past its genre word count, these self-editing and revision techniques will help you cut deep without gutting your story.

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Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:40 Overwriting Is Not a Flaw
2:59 Scenes That Shouldn’t Exist
5:30 The Late Entry and the Long Goodbye
8:26 Research Bloat
11:29 Redundancy
14:12 The Sunk Cost
17:06 What Order Do You Do This In?

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