You stare at the cursor and press delete. Five thousand words vanish from your work in progress (WIP), and your stomach drops like an elevator. You’re sure you’ve just made the book worse, smaller, flatter—and then you read what remains, and the story breathes again.
I blocked off an afternoon with coffee and a timer. You can do the same. In four passes, I took dialogue that sounded like a robot reading a memo and turned it into people talking under pressure. You don’t need magic—just a few tight levers you can pull.
The room is quiet except for the soft tick of a kitchen clock and the slow turn of pages. Your manuscript sits warm in your hands—full of sentences you’ve nursed at midnight, coffee cooling in a chipped mug. Then the quotes from editors land in your inbox, and your stomach drops. How are you supposed to afford the thing everyone says you can’t skip?