A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-One-Hundred-And-Thirteen

I've been finding myself really pushing into some interesting new and fun territories in my fiction.  A lot of the time it is driven by an attempt to do something technical with the language, as a sort of challenge or game, maybe, but also with an awareness that these things impact what the story can do and communicate to the reader.  For example, I have been playing around a lot with very long sentences, often run-ons, but done with the intention of catching a sort of stream-of-consciousness breathlessness, a continuing motion that never pauses.  In some ways, what I think is best about applying a craft challenge of this sort is that it kind of distracts me from the larger picture stuff and forces me to focus on telling the story one sentence at a time.  Strangely, at the moment, this has actually been a good thing for me, as it seems like the larger elements of the story come together quite well when I focus on the smaller details of crafting a story.

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