Not long ago I finished a draft of a novel, and I plan to leave it in the hopper for a few more weeks so that I can look at it with fresh eyes when I’m between other writing deadlines. The manuscript is far too long, a bit over 115,000 words, but by the time I’m done revising it I expect it will be closer to 95,000.

In On Writing, which is a lovely and valuable guide, Stephen King recommends trimming by about 10% from the first draft to the next. In most cases, however, I find I can trim quite a lot more because of two pronounced tendencies of mine: I tend to use quite a lot of apposition, and I tend to overexplain the narrative state of affairs to the reader. Apposition is something of a stylistic tic for me. It’s never a pure echo or simple repetition, but an effort to add depth and tease out nuance. I’ll certainly snip away some instances of it, save a few words here and there. The real word-count savings will come, however, when I lop off slabs of prose I added to guide the reader.

That’s a hard habit to break. As a professor, part of my job is to reach both seasoned and less experienced readers, so that we can all take a long look at craft. I routinely loop back and recap so that folk can see where we’ve been and where we’re going. As a reader myself I often lean toward mysteries, where I know full well that clues are hidden away in bits of exposition. While it’s perfectly fair game to slip in a single surreptitious hint and never mention it again, I tend to enjoy the reading experience more when missing some critical bread crumb is not the end of my engagement with the game. The authors I like best tend to present the same clues in different guises, so the conclusions their detectives finally draw are foregone, if not obvious.

Deciding what the reader needs, however, always feels to me like finicky business. As the author I always know where things are going, so it can be hard to spot those moments when a little extra connective tissue would do the reader a world of good. At the same time, too many callbacks to passages past can make reading feel like a chore, or–the far greater sin, in my opinion–make the reader feel as though the author doesn’t trust them enough to piece the sequence together.

When I revise this time around I’m going to try to err on the side of respecting the reader, clearing away some of my overgrown attempts to steer them down the main trail. I hope that by doing so I can gently encourage them to look around and enjoy the prose a little more, trusting that the path will still get them to the end, even if they have to cross a few grassy patches. So that’s my little takeaway for the day: when in doubt, cut–but save the file before you do, just in case.