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What's going on with me?

I'm soaring along on my Halloween project, Sympathy. My writing was easily 1500 words/day, but the cool part was, I didn't need to force it, or give myself ultimatums or minimums.

Quantity vs Quality

It's certainly possible to write thousands of words per day. Anyone can string together words, and anyone can write one mind-numbing sex scene after another. If you're finding you resort to auto-pilot just to get your wordcount in, maybe stop to consider what it is you want out of writing. Do you want to be that author who writes a lot? Or do you want to be the author who writes well?

Quality Check

Here are a few things to look for if you've been cruising along on auto pilot:

• Cliches - if you describe something with a cliche, it becomes invisible to a reader
• Inappropriate metaphor/simile - a very quick way to pull someone out of a story
• Redundancies - trust the reader; if you show them something, you don't need to tell them what you've just shown
• Spark - this is elusive, but what's the story's spark? What makes it special?