The Clarifying Cut

Forcing yourself to revise with arbitrary wordcounts.

Slicing .gif from Omoide no Mānī (When Marnie Was There)

For the past few weeks, I was working on short story that kept getting longer and longer. I thought I needed more scenes to establish the characters, explore the central idea, and build the required tension. The writing was slow. Eventually, the story sprawled to over six thousand words. Then I saw…