At the risk of sounding kinky, the pleasure is in the pain. Yeah...that needs clarification.
Yes, it sucks to cut words to hit the 750 mark. To come in under a thousand while telling a complete (beginning, middle, end) story is pretty tough, so if your first draft did that, bravo. Then you need to cut about 25% of it? Really? Well, it can be done and it's a good exercize. The firt draft had extra stuff in it. Trust me, it did.
First pass, I remove the obvious stuff: -ly adverbs, dialog windups (things like "obviously" or "the way I see it", etc.), wordy descriptions (they don't belong in flash), clever world-building that doesn't really touch the story, that kind of stuff.
Still not at 750, but it's lean. Call it 875. Need to cut 125 more.
Now I think about condensing things that work into more efficient chunks. For me, this is usually dialog, but it could be description or foreshadowing or whatever. Did I take some of the clever out of the story? Probably. Is it better for it? Usually. This is boiling a story idea down to its purist elements. If you can make it happen faster without losing the plot thread, try it. I often try this in the wrong places and have to put thins back ad try again. It's an art, not a science. Odds are you fixed the right stuff when you can't remember what it used to say.
So now I've murdered some darlings and maybe I'm under 800. Still...20 to 40 words to cut.
Now is where I cut the line -- sometimes even a paragraph -- that the story can survive without. There is always one in there. It's bogging things down even though it has a definite role to play. The story just doesn't need it. Find it, pay it your last respects, and kill it. Make it quick so there is no suffering. (You did back it up, right?)
Now I've probably hit...738 or something. My first instinct: "hey, I can put something back." Don't do it!
Sleep on it. A few nights maybe. Get it back out when you can barely remember what the thing said. Read it with fresh eyes (maybe printed out in a different font) and figure out what doesn't make sense. Add 2 or 3 words at a time to make the story clear. Not clearER, just clear. I sometimes make line-level changes at this phase, typically to make the 2 to 3 word clarification fit into the sentence- and paragraph-level mechanics.
If this puts the story over 750 words, you did something wrong. Go back and try each editing phase again.
What's the point of the double entendre? (Maybe a 1.5 entendre.) Most stories can be trimmed this way, regardless of length. This provides a small scale to practice your frustration with minimal time investment. To learn this process with a novel...yeah, the pain there is pretty severe.
Is this a foolproof system? Heck no. I doubt it works for anyone other than me. So your mileage will most certainly vary.
And be aware, not every story works as flash. So if you just can't wedge the thing under the 750 bar no matter how hard you shove, start over with another idea. The worst that could happen is you get two stories written instead of one. (Don't throw me in the briar patch!)
Good luck to all.
