I was writing this horror story for a class and kept going, thinking I was building tension. Turns out I accidentally wrote 5,000 words of the main character just wandering around in a fog. My professor pointed out that the whole thing read like a fever dream and I had zero plot movement. I honestly thought the slow burn was working until my roommate read it and asked why the character kept forgetting where they were. Has anyone else lost track of how much filler they wrote before realizing the draft was basically pointless?