Cutting out the 'small talk'

I am rubbish at small talk, something my kids decry on car journeys as the silence lengthens, but it’s just that I view words as tools, there to impart information or do a specific task rather than fill space.
It is the same with writing. A student once asked me to do a session on ‘padding’. Of course, I said no. Each word in a story must do a job so there is no need for padding.
The big challenge with writing is creating and maintaining pace and cutting out the padding, the small talk, helps achieve it.
These are busy times. Readers are busy people. That means you need to write with pace to engage them and in short stories the space available to do that is at a premium although the same arguments apply to novels.
Simply put, the more 'story' you have the faster the 'pace'. It is about picking out what really matters. It means examining everything in your story, line by line, and asking if you need it?
The writer Rob Parnell says: “So, what defines story? Usually anything that is told in real time - in any tense - about the characters, their actions and some immediate description - that carries the main narrative forward.  Everything else is basically fluff - not because it's not important to you - but because it's stuff the reader is not particularly interested in.”
It’s sound advice.

John Dean