Writing Update: 12-10-25
🕑 Added 2025-10-12 11:16:40 +0000 UTCChange (since last update): +6,760
Year to date: 164,374
Oof, what a week! 14-hour day at work, and other distractions - specifically, rats crawling up the drain and chewing their way into the bathroom! - haven't made for the best writing. Still, some progress made and I'm a good way into what should be the final chapter of Book 5. The overall shape of the chapter's slowly emerging, and I'm probably trying to squeeze too much into it, but I'm hoping to have it done, or at least close to done, by next weekend. Optimistic, but possible, I think.
Years ago, a colleague of mine, who absolutely detested our job, made an agreement with their partner to take a year off of work and take a stab at writing a novel. Which she did, and now all these years later, she's a successful novelist, living off her writer's income. I never read any of her books but having recently acquired a Kindle (an early birthday gift) decided to give one a read, grabbing it off of Kindle Unlimited.
And--it's pretty bad. Now, obviously I'm biased. I'm filled with jealousy and desperately wish I was in their position, making a living off of writing. But even accounting for gnawing envy, I'm pretty sure the writing's poor. The dialogue is clunky, especially in the opening chapter where it's ripe with exposition. Characterisation is thin. And individual chapter structure is formulaic, with each chapter ending with an obvious hook into the next one.
And yet--success, of a sort I've never found. Now, on the one hand, I'm writing in a -very- niche genre. But also, this former colleague of mine, they've actually - gasp! - finished a novel, and moved on to another, and finished that one, too, and so on. The writing is a hell of a lot pacier than mine, with little descriptive prose and even less introspection, none of that dense inner monologuing that runs through most of my writing. Chapters, at a glance, seem primarily dialogue-driven, say 40-60%.
I have a little time off coming up, and I'm tempted to take a step back from Constant and anything else I've written and try my hand at something similar--to check my instinct every time I feel like dwelling over a passage and just push forward, with an aim at hacking out something short, pacy and simple--to see, even, whether it's a style I can write.
Comments
Fakeminsk
Well, it's the dream. I don't know if I'm dismissive rather than cautiously critical. I'm just very much aware of the weaknesses in the way I write.
Jade Diaz
You’re far too apt to dismiss your own abilities. I think you could easily make a living as a writer.
Dan T
This comment unwittingly echoes ideas from a book I've read, too, which is Stanley Fish's "How to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One". Fish suggests seizing upon great sentences and mimicking their form, where the content doesn't even matter for now.
Dan T
Funny how a hobby becomes the sort of thing we spend an entire vacation on. I can't imagine [sarcasm] how a reader of Stephen R Donaldson might end up with an introspective and winding style in their own writing ...but that brings me to an idea for your writing exercise: What if you pick someone's _style_ to mimic while still creating your own story? I'm thinking of a poetry composition course that I took during university, where we spent each week studying a structural form of poetry -- sonnet, verse, blank verse, single-sentence, elegy, and so on. Then we would write something of our own within that style, and the students would workshop each other's pieces via in-class discussion/critique. The point was the original composition, but the exercise was the trying-on-for-size of the different forms. Each of us had a form that was clearly not a very good fit, but the best way to learn which style worked best for us was simply to do those trial runs. In your case, if you're thinking about an exercise, you could try to vary it by chapter / vignette / novelette. I'm spitballing here, but categories could include "short and punchy"; "mainly dialogue"; "first person"; "third person limited"; "present tense"; "no more than one adjective at a time". Generate your own ideas, of course, but the suggestion here is to spend a day worrying more about the form than about the content.
