Hello Mr. Gaiman :)
I'm currently double my word limit for a short story I'm supposed to write for my English class. I've tried all the tips, "take out every "the", paraphrase as much as you can, etc." but I'm still struggling with the word constraints. So, my question is this: Do you have any tips on condensing text? For creative writing, reports, and other texts too :)
Thank you!
Not really. I tend to try and shorten things, and spend several hours editing and trimming and so on, and then do a word count and find out they just got longer. For a short story you can always ask yourself questions like, can it begin later? Can it finish earlier? Can I lose some of the middle?
Having said that, the first story I ever sold, Featherquest, was an 8,000 word short story when I wrote it, and the publisher accepted it on condition that I cut it to 4,000 words. So I did.
(When it was republished, thirty-something years later, I restored all the missing text. I don't think it was any better at 8,000 words than it had been at 4,000 words. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when I wrote it, although the published version was at least shorter.)
It was an episodic sort of a story, so I just trimmed out some episodes.
