This is a short piece this month in honor of Ursula K. Le Guin.

In the course of many edits, reading about craft, and working with critique groups, I evolved into writing in deep POV to express the emotions, flavors, and textures of my historical novel directly through the senses of my protagonist. The results have been rewarding, with often glowing feedback from my alpha readers. A not-so-great result was the growth in word count. The average acceptable count for this genre is 90,000 – 110,000 words.

Well, one might ask, why be average? And the answer is quite simple, as I learned the hard way. Agents rarely consider a manuscript longer than that, especially one from an as-yet-unpublished writer. My rich-in-emotions-flavors-and textures gem of a novel was at 140,000 words.

Several of my advocates advised testing the water and sending it to agents anyway. I did, and the response was as feared. So, after swooning and clutching my pearls, I faced the reality of having to cut my 140,000-word exceptional historical novel down to the average 100,000 words.

I searched my writing craft bookshelves for help and picked out a couple of my favorites, including Sol Stein’s, “Stein on Writing,” and Ursula Le Guin’s, “Steering the Craft.” It was Le Guin’s chapter entitled, “Crowding and Leaping” that started the sirens blaring and the lights flashing.

She describes what she calls “crowding” by comparing it to Keats’ advice to poets to “load every rift with ore.” In other words, don’t use “flabby” language and make every word carry its weight. I think I’m pretty good on that score. But the next part grabbed me.

“Leaping,” she says, is what you leave out. “Overcrowded descriptions clog the story and suffocate themselves…in revising, consider what merely pads or repeats or slows or impedes your story, and cut it. Decide what counts, what tells, and cut and recombine till what’s left is what counts. Leap boldly.”

“LEAP BOLDLY!” My mantra from now on. Following her advice, I am down to about 116,000 words and still LEAPING. But that doesn’t mean discarding. I am keeping all the “darlings” I cut in a separate file, which has headings related to where in the story they came from, should I want to add anything back later. Or perhaps the bits and pieces will become part of another novel or short story. Lots of possibilities and double the advantage: by taking the extra delights away, I created a store of material for future opportunities and put “Destiny Reclaimed” in its best Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes for when (notice I didn’t say if) the next agent requests pages.

Thank you, Ursula, and rest in peace.