I’ve been struggling mightily with my current project, a novella I have been working on since 2016. I have persisted through four drafts now, and I hope that the current draft, the fifth, will be closest to what I have wanted the project to be from the inception.
But it’s been so damn hard to write. I couldn’t figure it out until this evening why that is.
It’s minutiae. It’s about the small things that make our lives. The earliest draft was all about small and unremarkable things occurring.
Fiction these days tends to gravitate towards, well, bigger things. Bombast. Explosions and epic love.
So on one hand I have an inner critic, we’ll call him Asshole. Asshole likes to tell me that “no, you have to have a catchy beginning” or “no, this has to be BIGGER and MORE IMPORTANT”. On the other hand I have my Muse. And he is persistently trying to get through to me and guide me towards what the story actually is.
In addition, writing minutiae is hard. It’s so easy to write too much, to clutter a story with extraneous things. On the other hand, it’s equally easy to write too little, and leave the reader parched for more.
I know I will eventually figure it out and find my groove with the project. But for now it’s a bit of a slog.
J. S. Kuiken 
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