Miscellaneous writing observations. All true for me.
I haven't updated my blog readers on my book progress for quite some time. So, here are some current stats and notes.
I'm currently at 61,543 words. My next goal is 80,000 words, a completely arbitrary number. The book may be finished before I hit that mark. Or it might not be finished till I hit 120,000 words. No way of knowing at this point.
I don't have an ending yet. I have a scene which I love which could be the final couple of pages of the story, but I don't know yet if they are.
Reading the book, The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet has helped tremendously as I learn the skill of writing inside my main character's head, depicting what she is thinking. Currently, I am re-working everything I have so far with Katie's thoughts in mind.
I am currently reading an Amy Tan novel, The Hundred Secret Senses. I rarely like novels, and I am not a big fiction reader, period, so it has been a challenge for me to find novels that I like. I like Tan's, very much. I like "clean" writing; writing that does not depend on complicated structures, vocabularic dances*, affectations, and literary tricks. When I come across these things, I suspect I am being fed a bait and switch so that I do not notice a lame plot or lazy characters. (See On Writing Well, which is about non-fiction, but which has so many good things to say about writing clean.)
I am working hard at being much better about working on-task on my writing, wasting less time messing around, being more efficient with the time I have in front of the keyboard. I'm only having modest luck so far. One thing that helps is a timer; write for 20 minutes, or 25, then take a break. Music helps. I've been spanking Pandora (that sounds naughty; it isn't) until it has yielded a fairly consistently on-target musical station for writing. In the end, there is no such thing as waiting for the muse to strike; she must be hunted, with laser sights and long-range weaponry.
*See what I did there?
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