Final Thoughts
"I Can Extract Proficiency" had finally officially come to an end.
Throw confetti!
By convention, a final thoughts post should be published after a book is completed. Dong Liu had spent nearly two years writing "I Can Extract Proficiency," and the experience had been too complex to put into words. It really was necessary to share some thoughts and chat with everyone.
Overall, this was the first novel in Dong Liu's writing career to truly achieve some success, so naturally he had deep feelings for it. Through this writing process, Dong Liu had grown a great deal—perhaps even more than he had through all his previous works combined. Only when a book had enough readers could one receive more feedback from them and draw lessons from that feedback.
Moreover, in terms of length, Proficiency was also the longest book Dong Liu had written in his career, with a total word count of nearly five million.
Throughout the writing of Proficiency, Dong Liu had carried a nervous heart, treading carefully at every turn. He tried his best to avoid every pitfall he could identify and worked hard to dig up every satisfying moment he could find. He wrote while feeling his way forward, crossing the river by feeling for stones.
But as the word count grew, the book's most fundamental problem was exposed.
No outline!
At the beginning, Dong Liu had basically just been struck by inspiration and written an opening he found fairly satisfying. Then he followed that feeling and kept writing. Immersed in that writing state, the early and middle portions had gone relatively smoothly. His control over the plot and his characterization had both improved compared to before. But because there was no outline, by the later stages, the plot and characters had become somewhat impossible