Just Keep Writing?

...and writing...and writing...

It always amazes me how little I'm able to write in one three-hour session. I'm talking about both the number of words and their relevance to the story. (Is there a story?)

By now, I'm wary of my sparse writing style and I recognize it as a downfall. I don't paint scenes with pictures, but instead with dialogue. I always defended myself by saying I'm not the flowery type, and that's true. I don't write a thousand words about a wallpaper pattern. But it's easy to err on the other side, too. I probably don't ground my characters in "place"; instead they just talk. They could be talking anywhere. I guess that's bad. I mean, I know that's bad. A story needs color. Because I write in first person, I see my imaginary world the same way I view the actual world. Sometimes my husband and I will come home from grocery shopping and he'll say, "Did you see that guy who...?" Nope. Didn't see anyone, really. I was too busy grabbing items off the shelves. I don't ponder my environment unless I'm forced to. If I'm stuck in a waiting room for twenty minutes, sure, I have time to notice the wall hangings and the hobbled chairs and the various people who alight from the elevator. What else is there to do? And like me, my characters don't "ponder" much. That's likely why I move on to the next scene so quickly ~ there's a lot to do!

So, mindful of my shortcomings, I'm now trying to flesh out my scenes. I won't claim that it's going well. My MC got a phone call while relaxing in her hotel room. I didn't describe the room ~ at all. What's there to say? Aren't all hotel rooms pretty much the same? Instead, I showed her doing different things as she carried on her conversation. She wandered into the bathroom to draw a bath. She noticed as she lay on the bed that her pedicure was chipping. There weren't a lot of things to do inside that room. I suppose she could have scrolled the channels on her muted television. I think I advanced the story a bit, but I didn't enjoy the roundabout way I accomplished it.

I got so involved in trying to add color that I left out a really important plot point; something so obvious it's embarrassing. Her friend (on the phone) informs her that her debut single has over a million streams on the most popular streaming service and is incredulous that her record label hadn't informed her of that. In her exhilaration, MC just lets that question slide, and she doesn't come back to it. Wouldn't she want to know? Dumb omission on my part. I'll need to fix that. Or maybe she's just as dumb as me, and another character will need to remind her that she needs to confront the label.

"Struggle" is an understatement here. Can you tell?

The worst part, if that's even quantifiable, is that I barely managed to write that scene and a subsequent one before my writing time was exhausted. 

Just keep writing? I guess I'll have to....forever.