I'd been writing from 2015 into 2016 just now. There was no nostalgia, no poetic feeling about bidding farewell to the old year and welcoming the new one—only the calm that came from habit. 2015 had been exhausting. In my personal life, I'd had to adapt to more people, more households, and more relatives. As for writing, with A World of One's Own passing the three-million-word mark, it had become harder and harder. Often, it wasn't that I didn't want to write extra chapters; I simply couldn't get the words out.
Why couldn't I get the words out? Maybe I was too hard on myself. I'd always felt that creativity and new plot twists were important, but they weren't the deciding factor. In this era of explosive creative output, many ideas and plot twists had become commonplace, and repetition was everywhere. How you told the story and arranged less original plot twists had become far more important. It was the same dish, but everyone made it taste different: some versions were incredibly delicious, while others were merely average. That was the reason.
So I'd always tried, when repetition was unavoidable, to make the plot feel fresh through the way I told and arranged it, and to keep the story from feeling formulaic. Getting started was easy, but as the story grew longer, the major plot developments were still manageable; avoiding repetition in the details, however, became harder and harder and took more and more thought. On top of that, I had to keep filling in and laying down plot threads while maintaining control over an increasingly complex situation. The difficulty of writing was only to be expected.
That was also why I often got stuck. It was why many characters had fewer appearances, too: I'd exhausted the related plots and