Narrative

I didn't have anything to do, I wasn't very inspired to do some writing, so I figured I would write a blog post to get in the mood and continue my story a bit later. With this in mind, I am going to share some bits of my philosophy when it comes to narrative, or, to put it more simply, what is it that I take into account when I write.
A lot of young writers (including myself, in the past) really struggle when they have to decide what kind and level of detail they should put in their stories: some write too much, some way too little. I have a few ways to determine what detail is necessary, what isn't necessary but is still useful and what should just be discarded.
There are a few questions I ask myself when I consider if a detail should be kept in one of my stories and these are the most important ones, in no particular order:
1) Does it give context or coherence to the story?
2) Does it set up future events?
3) Does it provide useful information about either the world or the main characters?
If the answer is "yes" for at least one of these, the detail is likely to be important and should definitley get into the final draft. Of course, I also ask myself if I have already given the information provided by the detail I am currently scrutinising, as redundancy is not something you usually want to have in a story.
The only kind of detail that I consider to be important but not necessarily vital is the one that builds atmposphere. It does depend on what kind of story I'm currently working on, but atmosphere isn't always necessary. Atmosphere is great to build certain kinds of emotions, like peacefulness, thoughtfullness and some specific kinds of happiness. Other emotions that really need build up are the uncanny, feelings of uneasiness and fear. You probably get the idea, I don't think that I need to mention each and every kind of feeling that needs atmosphere.
All kinds of details that don't do any of what previously mentioned is very likely to be unnecessary and, in my head, all detail that can be removed should be removed.
Sorry if my language sounded a bit repetitive in this blog post, I hope you can find it interesting regardless.