on Writers Helping Writers:

Writing an entire book is an immensely complex undertaking. Even if you’ve outlined meticulously, you’ll need more ideas than you can possibly imagine to fill the pages of an entire book (50,000 to 100,000 words or beyond, depending on your genre). And what you’ve mapped out in detail in an outline will only fill a portion of this.

Whether you’re writing fiction or pulling from real events for a nonfiction book, as you write, your brain will make decisions about what to include. What comes easily might depend on your mood or what you got up to that day.

When I read about characters making spaghetti while I’m editing draft pages of a writer’s fantasy novel, or a character cleaning their house in detail in a romance, I know instantly that the writer is bringing snippets of their own lives into their pages. Sometimes, these scenes are brilliant writing. Occasionally, the scenes are on point and tie into the rest of the book. But many times, scenes like these have nothing to do with the character’s journey, and they slow the pace of the book to the point a reader might stop reading.