And give it a try. I bet it will stretch you in new ways and make your writing even better.

A journalism professor of mine did something similar with passive verbs. We had to put the number of times we used is, are, was, were at the top of the page. It made you write cleaner, shorter and crisper articles… I always tried not to go over four.

When I was just a little girl in primary school, an author of children’s books came to our class and talked about how she wrote. I don’t remember who she was or what she wrote, other than picture books, but she said after she writes the story, she pays herself some quantity of money (a dollar? A quarter? I don’t remember) for every word she removed, and after she was ‘done’ with the story she took herself out to dinner with the money. I’ve never ACTUALLY done this, but I like the anecdote, and it makes me pay attention to how many words I cut out of something (I seriously compare word-counts). That makes my antsy, childish sub-conscious feel more positive about deleting things I worked hard on if I feel less like I’m losing stuff and more like I’m accumulating.

I have a hard time following too, but I try my best to be ruthless with it.