: The lesson I took away from learning a list of common bad writing practices, and the reasons why they disengage readers, is that writing right saves you time on your first draft if you can

@Phylliss352

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The lesson I took away from learning a list of common bad writing practices, and the reasons why they disengage readers, is that writing right saves you time on your first draft if you can bake the rules into your writing style. Every sentence I write and every scene I put together is with a mind towards not having to delete parts of it later (though of course sometimes I fail). Part of this is that, because I always know what is coming soon and I want to get there fast, I don't ramble and I don't waste the reader's time.

That's why I'm glad you gave a short vs verbose example, because I feel you can and should go even further. I would have written something more like this:

For two days all I could bring myself to do was research rentables from my bed. Everything near enough to my job meant sharing. Good, less scary.

See how everything you really wanted us to know comes out of that?

This example illustrates how certain pieces of standard writing advice complement each other. How do you avoid excess details? Let the reader infer them; in other words, you show instead of telling. Readers like to unpack what you've written and visualise the world however their mind sees fit, and (as I've explained before) they like to get inside people's heads as practice for the real world. (I've also discussed some advantages of showing here.)

So how do you limit details? Very simply, ask yourself whether a detail is worth your time as a writer to include, given what you're achieving already with your economic words and what you want people to take away from the sentence, the paragraph, the scene, the chapter. You'll often find yourself adding details later, when they're relevant. (For example, in my WIP I've revealed several details of a poor family's shoddy home, not by describing the whole thing the first time we see it, but seeing what they bring up in heated arguments, warnings to visitors, their insecurities etc.) So don't worry that you're not writing enough or would have to manually expand sentences when you're redrafting; neither of those will be a problem.

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