Working Like a Dog

This is how I start writing a blog post. Or anything, really:

It seemed about time to provide an update on how novel writing has been coming along so far in 2025.

I haven't posted a writing update yet in 2025, so I thought I'd do that, but then I

Every few months, I like to post

It's that time again on Lisa's blog when I try to find a new way to say I'm still writing, still slowly writing, to provide an update on my writing progress and hopefully a bit of entertainment.

The way I write involves a lot of piling up stacks of candidate sentences, whole or unfinished, until eventually I hit on something promising. Then I can delete the rejects, or strip them for parts. If I'm lucky, once I have a good opening, further sentences follow naturally, and I only need one version of each. Until I get to the next tricky point. Which might not come until the end of the scene, or might be in the next paragraph.

But even when I'm on a roll, I tend to type out words and phrases multiple times as I put sentences together. For example, I was about to delete these strays that appeared after the previous paragraph:

The next tricky point might

After I've piled up a series of candidate sentences, whole or unfinished,

Eventually I

When I'm making good progress, I barely even notice this aspect of sentence assembly, unlike the aspect where I slow way down to actively grasp for a workable idea. I suppose I must type a great many more words than I end up with, even when I don't have to delete a chunk of writing that I replace with a better idea.

I'm reminded of hiking with a dog, who runs ahead up the trail, then back down to check in, then eagerly uphill again, over and over. Does that make my fingers the dog? And the human hiker is... my brain? The story? This is probably an example of a paragraph I'd delete and replace with a better idea, if this were my novel.

But this is a blog post where I'm letting you in on the workings of my writerly mind, so I'll leave it in, along with a final selection of accumulated cruft to test your patience with this shtick:

Unlike the slower

is something I barely notice doing.

Now that I'm thinking about it, my writing process (if you can call it that)

I usually don't even notice how much my writing process (if you can call it that) involves typing even identical phrases

So, anyway, my novel. I'm writing it! It's slow going, but it's coming along! There are frequent tricky bits where I have to stop and figure out how best to set up a character conflict, lay the groundwork for a plot point, or convey a piece of worldbuilding. But I think what I'm producing is pretty good.

Like a dog on a hike, I spend a lot of time going over the same stretch of ground, and I want to be advancing so much faster. But like a human who can read the trail map, I know how far I've already come and that I'm incrementally moving toward the destination.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Laura B. McGrath looks inside the slush pile, analyzing data on a writer's odds of being discovered: "Any agent will tell you that finding a writer in slush is like finding a needle in a haystack. It's so difficult, and with such diminishing returns, that even agents who maintain slush piles still look for clients elsewhere. Still, we like to talk about the needles—those books that made it, against the odds. We can name them: Catch-22 on the one hand, Twilight on the other. But we know quite little about the haystacks in which they're found."