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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/39420
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/39420
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

There are three ways you can deal with long journeys.

First, skipping time is a time-honoured tradition. If nothing happens during the time of travel, you can just skip it. It is quite common to read things like:

> They have been travelling for two weeks when...

or

> On the third day of their journey...

Second, if you don't want to skip all the travel time, maybe something interesting happens along the way: they meet some people / they have to deal with bad weather / they run out of food / whatever. You're a writer, make something up. Note that if the encounter does not move the story forwards in any way whatsoever, it shouldn't happen. The characters should learn something, or change in some way, or it should be relevant somehow to what happens later. A scene needs a reason to be there, it can't just be filler. @J.D.Ray mentions Tom Bombadil as an encounter that could be cut out, but in fact it underscores several of the core themes of the novel, stresses the worlds largeness and strangeness, gives several veiled prophecies of things to come, and provides the first time Frodo finds his courage.

Third, you can shorten the distances between locations, so travel times are not that long and serve your story better. It is quite unrealistic, really, for people to live half a year apart. Since people would have needed place to sleep, feed horses and resupply, and travel would not have been safe, in Europe at least, a village would be close enough to the nearest town to go there for a market day and return the same evening. Unless you deliberately walked into uninhabited parts, you wouldn't be going more than a day or two without encountering at least a farm. And if you did go where no man lived, you'd be planning for it. For example, caravans crossing deserts along the Silk Road would be carrying food, water, shelter, they'd know where they could refill water, and there'd be a large party of them - a caravan, for safety.

Original score: 7