While I don't much care for snazzy rule lists, mostly because following them requires understanding principles that would render their advice useless, I do like the discussion here.
Regarding #2, it's easy to get caught up in the mechanics of things. The "how did [x] get to [city]?", the "what happened between year [x] and [y]?" and so and so on. I think finding ways to gracefully omit the stuff no one cares about is a big part of good writing. A lot of Adventures In Editing are about this. I remember convincing writerawakened to drop a 1000~1500-word grain carriage ride in Barefoot King because it was longer than it was worth. A few months later Romeo turned that around on me and convinced me to stop fretting about how everyone got to Durbans's cave because no one (else) cares, and it would definitely not be worth a whole extra one or two scenes in a story that had to set up the premise in minimal time and ended up to be only seven scenes total.
I've been meaning to remark on Starchild forever and I guess I might as well here. Let me know if you're not comfortable with that for the future. I felt that the story was stretched out in the first dozen chapters or so for the sake of slowly building up certain subplots, such as the Ministry of Truth and Marth's Angst, and these things took up quite a bit of space and time while events that are temporarily considered pivotal (such as Eirika's spacewalk) are very short. It's understandable, but on the reader end it feels slower than it really is.
There is decidedly a thing in writing where you want to build something up slowly while keeping your readers with you that I think is a pretty difficult thing to do. I'm pretty sure all my long-length pieces have failed on some level at it. The nice thing about super-short pieces is that they naturally demand it, and if they are effective, they automatically succeed.
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Regarding #2, it's easy to get caught up in the mechanics of things. The "how did [x] get to [city]?", the "what happened between year [x] and [y]?" and so and so on. I think finding ways to gracefully omit the stuff no one cares about is a big part of good writing. A lot of Adventures In Editing are about this. I remember convincing
I've been meaning to remark on Starchild forever and I guess I might as well here. Let me know if you're not comfortable with that for the future. I felt that the story was stretched out in the first dozen chapters or so for the sake of slowly building up certain subplots, such as the Ministry of Truth and Marth's Angst, and these things took up quite a bit of space and time while events that are temporarily considered pivotal (such as Eirika's spacewalk) are very short. It's understandable, but on the reader end it feels slower than it really is.
There is decidedly a thing in writing where you want to build something up slowly while keeping your readers with you that I think is a pretty difficult thing to do. I'm pretty sure all my long-length pieces have failed on some level at it. The nice thing about super-short pieces is that they naturally demand it, and if they are effective, they automatically succeed.