It’s easy for a draft to get bloated. Especially when you’re writing a complex story with a large cast and more than a couple of sub-plots.
Some writers may even feel like their short story is too short, eying two-to-three-inch-thick volumes on their own bookshelves and wondering if quality and quantity are really so separate.
At the end of the day, your story should be as long as it needs to be. No longer, no shorter. But how do you find that Goldilocks size?
What to Take Out
Anything that doesn’t affect the climax.
That’s it. It’s a big category, but an easy one to avoid if you’re thinking like a reader. Content that makes your beta readers start skimming, doesn’t wake a tired reader up, or sounds repetitious is often so because it doesn’t add or add up to anything.
Let’s cover a couple of specific story elements that can too easily dilute a story rather than strengthening it.
Delays
When a part of the story is meant to go on for a long time, it can be tempting to have it take up a large part of the story. However, there are better options.
You could use a montage. This works well for travel sequences, training sequences, and more. Start with a bullet point list of clips – short events or scenes that happened. Give each “clip” in the montage a short paragraph or two, then connect them with simple sentence transitions.
For lengths of time that don’t lend themselves to variety, first ask “is it really important that this part feel lengthy to the reader?” After all, “bored and impatient” usually aren’t on the list of feelings we want our readers to empathize with.
Let’s say the characters must undergo a long and uneventful journey. We could stretch the description of the trip out over a few pages to make it feel long and torturous, or we can show the reader that the characters are justifiably worn out in a simple paragraph or two.
The key is to focus on the characters’ perspective rather than trying to fit every detail. Describe how the sun bore down on them, chances to wash their clothes were few, the trail rations were salty, coarse, and difficult to chew, the water had to be rationed, and the dust choked every part of their clothes no matter how many layers they wore. Vivid description from the characters’ point of view can get the message across without dragging the scene on.
If it still feels too sped-up, add a relatively simple complication that can be encountered in one, struggled with the next, and resolved in a third scene before the description briefly resumes. Then we can transition to the conclusion.
Character Development
This is one category where it’s difficult to tell filler from necessary content. We writers often fall in love with our characters and love to write in every detail about them that we can possibly fit in.
However, character development is only useful if the character’s growth affects how they interact with the plot. For instance, leave in the bonding scenes if the bond between those characters needed to be strengthened before they could rely on each other later, otherwise leave them out.
Quick Tip: Ask yourself: Would the rest of the story still go the same if this never happened? If the answer is yes, you can probably remove it.
Nat Stewart Writes 