When you are writing it is often very easy to get wordy and stretch a story longer than it should be. Most of the time editing you are able to cut that sort of thing and have cleaner writing. That’s not what I want to talk about. I want about the times when you try to be efficient and end up cheating your readers out of the story they deserve.
As I do I have a story going on Instagram. The story is filled with a lot of gruesome and terrible things. Since it’s a horror story that’s too be expected. I read the story and discovered that in trying to tie things up for a reasonable story length I was robbing my readers of something that would take the story from awesome to meh.
What did I do? I summarized the final battle of the story to two throwaway paragraphs. When I read it again I realized “wait a minute this is the climax, I can’t just wave it away,” so I rewrote. It stretched the story to 3 more entries but it is what the readers will want. The character’s reactions and the horror of the situation were reflected. An important story point was one sentence. I stretched it, pouring the disturbing elements into it. When it was done I had taken a mediocre ending to an epic one.
So be careful what you summarize. Sometimes things that can add epicness to a story can be missed in the name of efficient writing.
