I am wondering about a side proble, though – sometimes the issue isn’t scenes with no tie-ins to the takeaway, but rather too many scenes/elements that have them. How do we gauge when we’ve connected too many dots and it’s causing the story to be unneccesaily complicated?

Yes! it’s something that’s easy to miss when filling a book, but something that comes up over and over as I coach and edit, where writers know something doesn’t quite fit, but can’t quite put their finger on it. Thanks for sharing this with the WHW community!

Awesome, Michelle – Thanks for letting me know it was helpful. It’s hard to let go of all those little bits we dream up, but totally worth it for the reader’s experience!