Over the last week or so, I have made a lot of progress. First, I am at least able to write for an hour each day. And this write means write; it doesn't include time spent in drinking green tea, or playing games, or hitting the space key a hundred million times. I have been able to reach the stage almost daily, where I can write without thinking.
And with the progress have come problems. I have seen two issues in my writing. I keep using -ly ending words a lot. I havent been able to see how to stop this, but at this point I will just keep writing and avoid them where ever possible. I will not be breaking my concentration, just because i wrote 'briskly' or 'promptly'. Once I am done writing, I will keep one revision only for -ly.
The second problem is time. How do I fill in time between two actions or speeches. I end up with a surfeit of phrases like "soon", "in a moment", "sudden" and "suddenly" (which is a culprit in two ways). I felt this to be a loose way of writing, and wanted to tighten things up, so I queried my writing group for the same, and got the following responses. All are good, and can be used depending on the situation. The most innovative, however, is marked in bold.
1. Why not describe something or have one of your characters do something, like fiddle with something, or move somehow? I don't know the context or setting, so it's difficult, but I seldom use "after a moment" or "soon after."
2. You can also describe something happening in the environment that implies the amount of time that has passed: the motion of a shadow, the changing sound of traffic, the melting of ice in a drink.
3. I usually describe it explicitly, eg 'seconds passed', or 'minutes later.'
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