Photo by Ann Hannes

Today’s guest post is by writer and editor Lisa Cooper Ellison. Join us on Nov. 18 for the online class Cutting Your Memoir Without Losing Your Story.

During the 17 years I spent in Louisville, Kentucky, I toured my share of bourbon distilleries. If I think about them long enough, I can conjure the bready aroma of the mash sitting in those vats, cooking and fermenting, in hopes of one day becoming bourbon.

A memoir in progress is a lot like that mash. It’s filled with the raw ingredients that will one day make a great story, and it’s tended by the writer, who maintains a steady faith in what’s been written. But few things shake that faith like being told you need to cut 10,000 words from your manuscript.

The first time I delivered that news, I watched the writer’s eyes widen into small moons. Their face blanched as they swallowed a few times before whispering, “But how?”

I know that panic. Years earlier, a writing mentor had shared that revision was her favorite part of the writing process right before giving me that exact challenge. Both felt like insanity. I loved drafting, where all that mattered was my pen on the page. Editing was the punishment I endured to make the work publishable.

Part of my resistance had to do with the pacing. During the dirty drafting phase, you can race to a word count. Line editing requires you to pause, ponder, and fiddle with the puzzle pieces of your story; progress is sometimes measured in sentences. Then there’s the fear that trimming your work will erase your voice or force you to kill the dearest of your darlings, creating a hole in your book you’ll always feel.

Most of us enter the line editing process white-knuckling a list of prescriptions: Exterminate all adverbs. Pare down adjectives. Slash through passive voice. Unmix those metaphors. Every item on that list points to a potential mistake. Yet hunting for errors can make you lose sight of what readers care about: prose that feels fresh and a feeling of connection to you.

Eventually, I became a convert, just like my mentor. During a recent interview for my podcast, Writing Your Resilience, Jill Christman, author of The Heart Folds Early, elegantly summed up in a single sentence what I had long since realized: Memoir is the art of distillation.

As you pare down your words, connections grow sharper, and you discover what you’re truly trying to say. The tricks you learn as you distill your story also give you a competitive advantage.

So how do we transform from white-knucklers preparing for mission impossible to creatives who actually enjoy this work? We change our mindset and our process.

1. Trade cutting for distilling

Words like cut, chop, hack and phrases like kill your darlings bring a violence to the revision process that jars the nervous system and diminishes what you’ve created. (If you’re noticing that my upcoming webinar is called Cutting Your Memoir, I see the irony and exactly how ingrained that language is.) Replacing that language with phrases like distilling your story or polishing your prose reminds you that your creation is already good. All you’re doing is refining, one stage at a time, just like the distillers who turned the mash into bourbon.

2. Give each pass one job

Most writers try to edit everything in one or two passes so they can hurry up and get to their favorite part: having written. Editing includes a lot of elimination, but you can approach this from a place of play rather than correction. Instead of hunting down every possible editing opportunity at once, choose one target to play with, so your brain can focus totally on it.

A target I like to start with is filter words like saw, heard, felt, noticed, realized, wondered, and remembered. They place the narrator’s perception between the reader and the experience, which adds words to your story while diminishing the reader’s connection to it.

Here’s an example:

I remember standing over the vat and noticing that the mash smelled like warm bread. (15 words)

The mash smelled like warm bread. (6 words)

While you could argue that memoir needs some moments where remembering is the point, most filter words can go.

If you’d like to watch your word count drop quickly, try this 10-minute experiment:

• Choose one page from the chapter in your memoir that feels the slowest and note its word count.
• Use your search function to locate the filter words listed above.
• Revise each one, keeping only those where the act of perceiving matters to the story.
• Record the page’s new word count, then multiply the difference between the two by the number of pages in your manuscript. That’s how many words a single pass could save.

Trim 15 words per page from a three-hundred-page manuscript, and you’ve eliminated 4,500 words without losing a single sentence.

Once you’ve finished this pass, pick another target. Passive voice is a great one to try. Passive constructions pair forms of the verb to be (is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been) with a past participle (cooked, mashed, broken, stolen). In passive sentences, the subject receives the action rather than performing it. Take this example: The mash was brewed by the distiller. To make it active, move the one doing the action (the distiller) into the subject position. The distiller brewed the mash.

If you’re not sure whether a sentence is passive, try the trick that professor Rebecca Johnson shared once shared on social media: add by zombies after the verb. If the sentence still makes sense, it’s passive, and probably a little dead on the page. For example, the mash was brewed by zombies still works; the distiller brewed by zombies the mash doesn’t.

You can search for is or was, depending on your manuscript’s tense, and work through the sentences that contain them, but be forewarned: you’ll also turn up plenty of sentences that aren’t passive, like I was tired, or she was walking. And since passive fixes often save only a word or two, think of this pass as adding life to the page, not something that will quickly shed words.

Want to make your synapses fire with a little extra delight as you do this? Find a writing buddy, choose the same target, and trade a few pages. Patterns are easier to spot in someone else’s work, because you’re not attached to the story. The writer, of course, always gets the final say regarding the edit. If you encounter a disagreement in your viewpoints, that’s a boon, because it can teach you something about how sentences work.

While these passes can help you get closer to your goal, they can’t tell you when a passage needs to leave the book entirely or when you’ve underwritten a moment and need to add words, not subtract them. If you haven’t made your bigger structural decisions yet, try the 10-minute experiment anyway. But save the full passes until your structure is settled, so you’re not polishing sentences that don’t make the next draft.

3. Honor what you leave behind

Not everything serves your story, whether that’s a phrase you adore or an event that mattered deeply in your life. It’s okay to grieve what doesn’t make the final draft, plus nothing is truly wasted as we write. You can repurpose that material for an essay or add your favorite phrases to what editor Sarah Chauncey calls her candy jar. But before you shift into preservation mode, let yourself feel the disappointment of leaving something you love behind.

I once had a full five-minute pity party over a scene I’d written well but couldn’t justify keeping. This may sound indulgent, but it’s actually another way to acknowledge that everything you’ve written was a necessary part of your creative process.

Bourbon makers have a name for the liquid that evaporates from the barrel as it ages: the angel’s share. Over the years, a barrel gives up a good portion of its contents to the air, and no distiller calls it waste. It’s part of how the bourbon gets its depth.

These days, when a writer whispers, “But how?” I invite them to start with one target and complete one pass at a time. I also tell them about the mash bubbling in those distillery vats. None of those vats contained garbage, and neither does your draft. Some words just aren’t meant to stay. They’re your story’s angel’s share. Letting them go ensures that what’s left is top shelf.