When is it ok to add filler to a story?
After a couple iterations I came up with the "skeleton" or summary of my story.
I have read many places and guides saying "if it's not advancing the story and can be removed without affecting it, then it shouldn't be there".
The problem is that if I just go jumping from point A to B, it feels more like a summary rather than a story. For example, there are two characters who have 5 dates. I can probably write them in 5 pages one after the other, but since the next thing that happens is the death of one of those characters, it doesn't have any weight and to the reader it seems like all of them happened in a weekend.
Should I add filler for this part of the story?
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1 answer
"if it's not advancing the story and can be removed without affecting it, then it shouldn't be there".
That has to be taken in a more general sense. Showing things about how a character thinks, feels and behaves is all "advancing the story", the story is about PEOPLE and showing them as people is advancing the story.
In the same way, showing the setting is advancing the story, by grounding the reader in the reality of the character's experiences. The class lessons in Harry Potter don't necessarily advance the plot at all, sometimes they are comic relief, or they are showing Hermione's consistent mastery of everything, proving (by showing) her intelligence and problem-solving capabilities. Those scenes are not there because the spells they learn are all that important to the plot, but Hermione's mastery is important, when she exercises it at critical points the "lesson" scenes make it seem realistic, instead of just a deus ex machina where she is suddenly extraordinary without any warning. And the class scenes also establish they are spending eight hours a day learning all kinds of spells, so it isn't surprising that they know spells we did not hear of before.
The job of the writer is to assist the imagination (with imagery) and build characters we care about, one way or another, all by showing them in various circumstances that prove who they really are.
The advice you are reading is to cut anything the story could do without. That is good advice, but realize the plot is not the only thing you need to worry about as a writer, you also want to immerse the reader in the setting and characters, so this all feels like a possible reality, like these are real people dealing with real problems facing them.
Anytime you find a passage that does not advance the plot, or the character, or detail the settings, you need to figure out why you wrote that in the first place. What made you feel something needed explaining? Perhaps you already explained it earlier, and just forgot, so this can be deleted. Or maybe you really did want to convey something new and important, and what you wrote failed to do that, so it needs a rewrite. ("Important" means it will affect behavior or feelings in the future for one or more characters, or it gives us a clue to who the character truly is, so later behavior doesn't seem like it came out of nowhere, it seems "characteristic".)
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