Spend the most time on what your players find interesting and skip over the parts they don't enjoy. Let the story follow the former and avoid the latter.
The easiest way to know what your players enjoy or want more of is by asking them!
Another one I really like is : your players never miss, sometimes their opponents or circumstances make things harder though.
Examples:
Your fighter doesn't miss the attack, his opponent just barely manages to block it, panic in his eyes.
You didn't miss the jump, you just dodged a shot and rolled the fall perfectly. It seems those guards don't want to make your escape easy.
Granted, this works in games where the player characters are presupposed heroic and competent, wouldn't use it in Dark Heresy or Cal of Cthulhu, probably