When writing ‘Some Luck’, Jane Smiley tried something new… she set herself a daily word target. “Then as I got further along in the book I would increase the number of words I had to write each day… I wanted the energy to build and I thought maybe the faster I went, the faster the energy would build as [volumes two and three of the trilogy] progressed.” In an interview with ‘The Bookseller’ magazine [September 5, 2014] I’ve never set a wordcount target like this, but Smiley’s comments about energy are interesting. It is certainly true that when I’m ‘on a roll’ I just write, I forget about time or wordcount, and I amaze myself at how much I have written. I guess that’s the energy she’s talking about here, the energy of the writer does translate to the page. I did read some writing advice: to finish mid-sentence and pick it up again in the same place the following day. I don’t think that would work for me. Some Luck is the first of a trilogy which follows the story of the same family over 100 years. In 1920, Walter Langdon returns from the battlefields of the Great War,
Read More