Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-5170510-20200215031603

I brought this up a month or two back, but I've been working on a story about Klaus, a German Army soldier in WWII, who is assigned to a weather station in the Arctic Sea whose purpose proves... sinister. The story is meant to be written like a lost journal, where it starts with him receiving the journal as a gift from his older brother before deployment to the weather station and he uses it to catalog the events each day, culminating in his narrowly escaping disaster before being captured by a US Navy warship.

My problem is I seem unable to write concisely, I go on at length and trimming down is like pulling fingernails. The point being, my results don't sound authentic. Is there anyone who could collaborate who knows how to do an effective journal format? 