The Aftermath of 'Send It'

This isn't the first time I've heard 'send it'. But it's the first time I actually did send it (see here for why I didn't before). I've been thinking this week about how differently I looked at my manuscript once I knew who would be reading it. Suddenly, the pages I thought were just fine (having been critiqued and edited and re-edited), didn't look as ready as I'd thought.

Length. The agent asked for the first 30 pages. For my novel, that included the first four chapters. But I really wanted to include chapter five in the sample, since the end of that one precipitated something significant for my character. So I really examined each paragraph, identifying which ones carried their weight, and which sentences could be eliminated.

Tightness. Once I started rereading the pages, I realized there were many words that weren't completely necessary. I hunted for words like 'that', unnecessary phrases like 'I saw', and excess prepositional phrases. A couple of made-up examples:
Before: I saw the guards moving closer.
After: The guards moved closer.

Before: She thought that she ought to leave now.
After: She ought to leave now.

Paragraph squaring. I made up this word, but I learned the idea from fantasy author Carol Berg. It's a way to shorten the length of a manuscript (and Berg should know--her first drafts can be as long as 175,000 words!). Look at the tail end of a paragraph--the words that don't fill a whole line. Try to eliminate enough words somewhere in the paragraph to eliminate the 'tail'. When I first heard this idea, I was skeptical, but it really made me examine my words with a new eye, and I felt so good when I shortened the manuscript by another line. I'll be using this in the future, for sure.

Working hard for a week helped me get rid of over one thousand words, and I fit the extra chapter into my sample pages. Whew! It wasn't easy, and I read and reread those pages more times than I could count, but it was worth it. Now I'm applying the same techniques to the rest of my novel, hoping to bring the word count down.

How do you tighten your writing? Does submitting to an agent or editor make you look at it differently?