Butt in chair time is real, and right now with the deadline fast approaching, it’s super real.
As necessary as Butt In Chair Time™ is, we may lose sight of reading. I know, I know, we should use every waking hour and every second of available Free Time™ to write, let’s not forget the rejuvenating effect of reading before or during writing.
I personally get caught in particular loops on individual projects in terms of sentence structure. For whatever reason, there are a handful of structures I use over and over, and I notice I’m routinely using them. In the grand scheme it’s not a big deal; everyone has them. Books always have them. When I read The Girl With All The Gifts I picked up on the author’s go-to sentence structure right away. It didn’t affect the quality of the book in any way; in fact, I liked it.
I was sort of in on the behind the scenes of the book. Not in any official way, but as a psychic author-to-author™ kind of way. I could see what he was doing in an objective almost scientific way, and then I could apply those observations to myself and my writing process.
And besides the bullshit authorly™ way of looking at books, it just helps reading something different and noticing a new way to start a paragraph. That little change makes the process fun for me, as well as makes things like editing for content easier down the road.
Hey, don’t worry about rushing to the finish line. You have all month in December to kick some ass too. If you’re feeling a little frustrated and overwhelmed, and you’ve seen yourself having trouble and slowing down, take it easy and do a little reading. Trust me, it works.