Hello, Santeven Quokklaus, aka stevengepp!


INITIAL IMPRESSION / OVERVIEW:

I enjoyed reading your "Pointless Scenes" blog post every time I read it, including today.

Your writing kept me riveted and I read straight through to the end.



MORE DETAILED FEEDBACK:

Happy Writing.Com Anniversary day and month! I read this "Pointless Scenes" blog post of yours earlier today, and enjoyed it, but didn't have time to review it right then, so I flagged it for an anniversary review (meaning I saved the link to it in a special "December" file. ). I hope you enjoy this review as a celebration of your time here and find the review uplifting and encouraging.

I could totally relate to this "Pointless Scenes" blog post of yours, as a reader and as a writer. I am guilty of adding pointless scenes to increase word count for National Novel Writing Month, though I kept those in a separate file until I'd decided the book was too terrible to bother publishing. I wouldn't purposefully publish something with useless scenes though. And you are 100% right about readers skimming, skipping forward, or just abandoning a book when the pointless scenes (or endless descriptions) just bog things down.

I should probably just email you this privately, but I'd probably forget. So, writing question... I tend to write short. I like writing short stuff. But I'm in this writing class and they want a lot of what they seem to think of as details, but what seems to me to be endless descriptions. And a story I'd normally have at 1,000 - 2,000 words, they want made into 7,000 - 8,000 words. They say that's what readers want, and especially to be sure to use all the senses in every single scene. I think they even gave a rule of thumb to make sure you do all five senses every five hundred words, at a minimum. I do think it's important to use all the senses, but every five hundred words seems excessive. Do you do this in your writing? If you do, I didn't notice, so you did it better than the folks teaching my class. How do you determine the balance between enough detail to bring a reader into your scene and not too much to bore them? This could be a series of future blog posts for you, maybe. Or if you've already written about this, please share the links.

I appreciate how you stay humble: "those are the scenes that I personally feel can be looked at as being unnecessary or maybe kept to a minimum word count. Of course, any work is the work of an author, but I do think these things could at least be kept in mind." And I agreed with you on all of the things you brought forth in this blog post.

I thought you did a great job with providing food for thought and helping other authors learn to eliminate pointless scenes with this blog post.

I didn't notice any spelling or grammatical mistakes (or mistakes of any kind) in your "Pointless Scenes" blog post.

I thought the personal, writing, and educational genres you selected were appropriate for this blog post (and overall blog) of yours.



IDEAS TO MAKE YOUR PIECE STRONGER:
I would love to have something great to share here, but I think it's wonderful as it is. Well done!


As with any review, please take what serves you and release or ignore what doesn't.


CONCLUSION:

I enjoyed reading your "Pointless Scenes" blog post, and agreed with your sentiments that you expressed in it.

Thank you for sharing your time, creativity, knowledge, experiences, and writing with the Writing.Com community!

Once again, happy anniversary day and month! I hope the year ahead is filled with blessings and joy for you!

May love, joy and peace be yours in abundance!
PWheeler










Positive Hearts
A Review from: "Positive Hearts Reviews Group" 




My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .