Before he became one of the best selling authors in history, Stephen King taught English composition to high school students. If he ever looked over any of his students' college essays, I’ll bet he gave them some of the same advice he offers up in “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes.”
Here's what King would have told students who insisted they needed to go over the word limit to tell their stories.
"Remove every extraneous word…Get to the point. And if you remove all the excess garbage and discover you can't find the point, tear up what you wrote and start all over again . . . or try something new."
He would have told them that using big words kids don't normally use won't lead to great writing.
"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."
For kids who insisted on getting feedback from multiple sources (especially from those who'd never taught writing or worked in college admissions)….
"Listen carefully to what they tell you. Smile and nod a lot. Then review what was said very carefully…if everyone – or even most everyone – is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say."
And most importantly, he would have told them not to get so attached to a story that you couldn't let it go.
"If it's bad, kill it. When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law."