“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” – Elmore Leonard
If your a writer, you are also most likely a reader as well. As a reader you’ve probably come across too many books that seem to be chocked full of useless and irrelevant words. It truly is a fact that most book publishers pay for word count, but far too many authors fail to make those words count.
I attest to the fact that this area is one of the hardest for me to get a true handle on. When I write, I write from the heart and mind and soul and to me every single word counts. The problem is that many of your readers won’t agree with you.
You want your readers to read every single letter you jot down, but admit to yourself now that such a reality doesn’t exist. Pretty much all readers skim, just like you are doing right now, looking for the useful morsel or nugget that you can take away from these few minutes that I stole from your life.
My suggestion, which is admittedly sometimes very difficult to stomach, is to have others read your work before you wrap it up in a final draft. When they have read it they will most likely give you very valuable feedback, but you can also ask questions of them.
Specifically ask, “Did you find any of it to be superfluous? Did you skim any of it? Which part(s) did you skim?”
If you receive feedback to such questions, you will be able to remove the parts that others won’t read and be closer to achieving your goal. That is, if your goal is to remove “filler” from your masterpiece.
