About this course

The videos included in this course are recordings of a live class. The instructor is not available for questions or feedback at this time.

Do you struggle with making your writing concise? Have trouble drafting flash fiction, or fight to trim a story down enough to squeak under a market's upper limit? Sometimes the answer is a chainsaw, lopping off whole characters and scenes . . . but sometimes it's a scalpel, paring the text down one word at a time.


In this class you'll observe a live demonstration of "wordcount surgery." Using her own work, Marie Brennan will show you line-level tricks for making your prose as tight as possible --
without losing content. Whether you're trying to squeeze under a line or just make every sentence dense with flavor, you'll find useful techniques here.


Topics Covered:

  • Word choice
  • Removing extraneous words

Student Takeaways:

  • How to trim stories to meet word count without losing content

Duration of Class

40 minutes










Example Curriculum

  Course Materials
Available in days
days after you enroll

About Your Instructor

Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly leans on her academic fields for inspiration. She recently misapplied her professors' hard work to The Market of 100 Fortunes and The Waking of Angantyr. She is the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author of the Victorian adventure series The Memoirs of Lady Trent along with several other series, over eighty short stories, several poems, and the New Worlds series of worldbuilding guides; as half of M.A. Carrick, she has written the Rook and Rose epic fantasy trilogy. For more information and social media, visit linktr.ee/swan_tower.


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