> Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them

> Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. There are two good pieces of advice here, I think. One is about thick paragraphs of prose, and I think it really comes down to ergonomics. It's hard to read big walls of text. Word count in this context doesn't matter so much as word spacing. The second point is that some writers tend to include all the mundane details and in-between stuff that surrounds the story, but isn't actually part of the story itself. What constitutes "the story" and what constitutes "the other stuff" is, of course, dependent on the story being told, the author, and even the reader. If you're reading Tolkien, the journey is the story. But if you're reading modern fantasy, you might want to skip all the walking between battles.