The 400 Words

Lately I've been working on studying stories I admire, trying to determine what each sentence does. Good sentences do more than one thing, which is always a goal of mine, so seeing how other writers are able to pull that off helps me tremendously. After working on that exercise, I'm trying to determine what my sentences do. Sometimes it seems like they just sit there, which is not a good thing. This morning I spent about an hour and a half working on just a few paragraphs (about 400 words) of a story, determining exactly how each sentence functions, why it's there, if it's in the wrong place or shouldn't be there at all. I found that several sentences either served no purpose or basically reiterated the previous sentence. Yeah, I spent an hour and a half on 400 words, but I feel that those 400 words are pretty good now.