Sherwood Anderson, the roustabout journeyman who scrabbled around in manual labor and lived in a Chicago tenement before achieving fame with Winesburg, Ohio and then never managed to top himself no matter how much he wrote, had ideas about what made for subpar writing:

• “Joyce, a gloomy Irishman, makes my bones ache. He is up the wrong tree.”

• “[Hemingway] had got into a kind of romanticising of the so-called real . . . a kind of ecstasy over elephant dung, killing, death, etc. etc. And then he talks about writing the perfect sentence – something of that sort. Isn’t that rot?”
• Worst of all was “cleverness” of any kind (except Thomas Wolfe)

What did Anderson approve of? Keeping it “loose.”

Nice and specific, that. Only Anderson is actually right. Once it seems like a chore, feels labored, or gives you the sensation of rolling a boulder up a never-ending slope, time to regroup. If you are feeling that way, the reader will, too.

Regroup. Circle back. Shake it off. Start over. Move fast, bring no outline, live off the land.

Keep it loose.