Writing is Hard

Writing is hard. Perhaps that’s an oversimplification. The mechanics of writing are easy, especially in a day and age with computers with spelling and grammar checkers. You can even use an app that tells you how good your writing is¹. It’ll tell you when you end a sentence on a preposition, or when you’re too passive, or use too many adverbs. None of these tools are perfect, but they do a good job of propping up one side of the process to make life easier for the writer. But writing is still hard.

Part of the problem is one of scale. I want to write novels, and the average (or perhaps suggested²) novel length is about 70,000-100,000 words. At around 300 words per page, that’s 230-330 pages. As a reader that sounds like a small book, barely a pamphlet that one could burn through in a day or two. It certainly sounds like a good enough target and surely one that a dedicated writer could knock out in a few months? But let’s look at it a little closer.

Imagine you can write like Stephen King. He says he writes six pages per day, rain or shine. Let’s round that up to an even 2000 words. That means we’ll finish our 70,000 word novel draft in 35 days. Easy! But of course you are not Stephen King and maybe those 2000 words come slowly, maybe you can only manage 1000 words a day, 500 maybe? That’s now 2-4 months writing every single day, without missing your target. Of course that also assumes you know what you want to write and where your story is going. Maybe you’re a discovery writer and none of that matters, you’ll just follow the thread of the story and see where it takes you. With luck you’ll reach the end of the first draft faster than a plotter but my money is on you having a mountain of editing to do afterwards. Or maybe you’re a plotter and you find yourself spending just as much time planning and thinking before you even put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.

Personally, I’m not a discovery writer and nor am I a plotter. I’m somewhere in the middle. What I need when I sit down to write is the idea of a scene, who’s involved, where I’m starting, and where I’m going. Any more than that and I feel strangled into writing a specific way, any less and I’ll write myself off a cliff and end up with characters in places I never wanted them to begin with³.

My problem with plotting is that it’s so challenging to quantify progress. When I’m writing the book I know roughly how many words I want to write in a day and sometimes I hit the target and sometimes I don’t. Ultimately I have a counter that tells me “today you have done X amount of work.”

Plotting doesn’t work that way. Behind me on my wall I have three whiteboards, one for each act of the book. When I was planning the main plot points I spent very little time writing on the board and a lot of time chewing the end of my pen and staring off in the distance, thinking about the story. Does this count as forward progress? Of course it does. Does it feel like progress? Not in the slightest. You look at people like Brandon Sanderson who regularly provides actual percentages for his progress on books. “Today I can confidently confirm that Starlight 5 is 10% complete,” he’ll say and my jaw hits the floor thinking about what that actually means. He’s obviously right at the plotting end of the spectrum so I imagine that kind of measurement is easier, but it’s still astonishing to me that not only does he have these numbers but that he consistently hits his targets. Perhaps it’s all smoke and mirrors.

The other thing that no one seems to talk about too much is the self-doubt and the constant questioning of what you are writing. Are the characters right? Is this compelling enough? Is this preachy? Is the theme working? What even is the theme? Is the pacing right? So many questions that can cripple progress, and I hope that these things don’t just happen to me. Currently I am wrestling with my world building. In my head it’s a generic dystopia. There are no unique ideas there, and progress has ground to a halt. It’s so hard to continue writing when in the back of my mind I know there are significant problems that will lead to significant rewrites.

Why am I ranting about this? Excellent question. I’m not sure myself. Frustration with the process I suppose. Perhaps I’ll write reports on here for sole purpose of recording some progress, whether that’s a word count or some world building or plot knot I’ve managed to unpick.

I want to make it work, but I spend half the time fighting myself instead of putting ideas down on paper and moving forward with the book.