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Q&A Cutting down story length without leaving out locations

I'd like to write a story and I have plenty of elements for it, up to and including a set of locations, characters and events, as well as some loose sequence for those. This is still a planning ph...

1 answer  ·  posted 6y ago by Zoltán Schmidt‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T09:03:11Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/36772
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Zoltán Schmidt‭ · 2019-12-08T09:03:10Z (over 4 years ago)
I'd like to write a story and I have plenty of elements for it, up to and including a set of locations, characters and events, as well as some loose sequence for those.

This is still a planning phase, though, and I can already see it would span much, **much** longer than suitable for a beginner. I consider the scope of the story quite epic, but huge chances are I won't become the next Oda Eiichiro, let alone Tolkien.

Therefore, primarily for the purpose of speeding up the introduction of new major characters (which would take ridiculously much time at the current pacing), I'd like to tweak on the scope.

The problem, however, is that for irrelevant reasons, some of the locations visited and introduced in the story are rather fixed already. Some are only relevant for one arc/chapter, but I can't really let them out.

With this in mind, what are some rules of thumb I can use to cut down the length of the story?

I know, leaving little time at each location is one option, but that is quite vague of an idea.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2018-06-07T07:47:09Z (almost 6 years ago)
Original score: 8