USE THE HOLIDAY SLUMP TO YOUR ADVANTAGE
Halloween, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas and New Year. The next three months will suck you away from whatever writing routine you may have. Don’t lament, don’t cry, don’t panic.
Accept the fact that you will be distracted. Downshift your expectations and take a detour.
Take the slowdown as an opportunity to stop writing new material and use it to improve what you’ve already written. Here’s how. Mark up the first three pages based on which of the three types of writing each sentence falls under: description, summary, or immediate scene. Use different colored highlighters or underline or circle. Whatever works for you.
Then look at those pages and assess which type of writing dominates. If description or summary come out on top, you have a serious problem. Go through the rest of your manuscript and mark it up. When you finish, you now have a roadmap of what you need to do. The good thing is that you can work on small segments at a time.
You don't need hours to write an entire scene. You can work on just one page. Don't worry about continuity. Just make one page better. Have a half hour? Rewrite a few pages. Convert description to compact images. Get rid of long summary. Upgrade your chapters into immediate scene. Increase dialogue. Look for other ways to better say what you wrote before.
Whether you get done during the holidays doesn’t matter. If you do this mark-up, you’ve set an inventory of work to get done over whatever timeframe works for you. Doing this exercise will make a significant improvement in your novel.
When you’re done, go back to page one of your manuscript and read through to see if it is “a dramatic story told dramatically.”
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