When writing becomes forced

73500 words. That’s how many words I’ve written so far and yet everything I’ve written the past week reflects 100% what Stephen King had written in his book On writing when he described what writing sometimes may look like: shoveling shit from a sitting position… I haven’t read many of his books nor am I yet a big fan but the man described my last week in the best way possible.

It’s not that I don’t know what to write (I have my outline from the Snowflake method), it’s just that a) what I write sounds to me like a five year old child has written it (and if I can’t satisfy myself, how can I expect to satisfy compete strangers?!) and most importantly b) somehow the story I outlined now seems to have huge holes that make me arch my brow as I read the outline. And, to make things worse, now that I’m 70k+ words into the story, I can’t help but feel that my inciting moment has taken too long to appear. Yay… *sarcasm*

I feel bogged down and that I’ve somehow lost something along the way; perhaps the spark, perhaps my focus of the inner thoughts of the character perhaps… I don’t know!

Over the past week I’ve been reading less fiction and more articles from agents. Nearly every one of them simply states the obvious: it’s really really hard to make it in the publishing world. What are the chances that a non-native English speaker can traditionally publish a book, when others have failed? Maybe that’s the reason I feel lost and everything I write seems, well, like shoveling shit from a sitting position.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: novel, novel writing, outline, writing