I’ve had to put a stop to my habit of constantly going back over my previous night’s work and pruning and re-pruning scene by scene. It isn’t systematic and it distracts me from writing more. Let the words flow free!

That said, some kind of act structure, scene list or flowchart or something would probably be helpful if you wanted to write a story within a set number of words, and knew what you wanted before you started.

Then you could budget out how long each scene should be and aim for that mark. The trick would be not to sweat it if you went a little over or under. Hope that helps!

I’d make the very fitting example of Pirates of the Caribbean (which I liked, but was harshly criticized for its playful tone) but this is probably not the place. If you take a look on my tumblr site there’s my email address, in case you’d like a little chat sometime with the crazy Italian lady (which is me)

What I’ve learned, is that you can have a transitional *sentence* – to convey a long passage of time, a long journey or whathaveyou in a few words – but not a transition scene. A scene moves the story forward, while a transition should move you over the boring parts – which is kind of a contradiction. If you’re making the transition longer because there’s some genuinely important information or event taking place, maybe it needs to be shown in a scene of its own, or you might find a way to convey the same information somewhere else in a more interesting way.

The usual disclaimer is that this advice comes from my own experience (and reading), so it might not apply to the problem you’re facing – or I might have gotten the whole issue all wrong.