The Good News? Writing Never Gets Any Easier

First-time novelists often believe their first novels will be the most difficult writing of their lives. Once they’ve stamped finis on Novel #1, our writing worries will be over. By that point, surely we’ll have a handle on this writing gig, and everything from here on out will get progressively easier. But… not so fast!

As of this week, I’ve written eight novels, and I’m here to tell you it’s simply not true that writing gets easier with time and experience. In some ways, it actually becomes more difficult.

Does Writing Get Easier or Harder?

When I wrote my first (eyes-only) novel, the words flowed, the characters spoke, and the whole thing was on paper in a few victorious months.

That first story was nothing but fun.

Of course, it also stunk, because I had zero idea what I was doing.

What little I learned from that novel, I applied to the second (also eyes-only), and what I learned from the second I applied to the third (you guessed it: eyes-only). With each novel, my awareness of the craft increased a little bit, and with each little bit that my awareness increased, so did the difficulty of getting the story right. By the time, I reached Novel #4—which I can now look back at as a personal writing plateau, a place where I finally got it as a writer—writing was downright hard.

It was about then I came to the epiphany that writing was probably never going to get any easier.

In “On Finding Your Mentor” (Writer’s Digest, January 2011), Dinty W. Moore quotes his professor Vance Bourjaily’s wisdom on the subject:

It doesn’t ever get any easier…. Each book presents a new narrative puzzle, and you start off with no idea how that puzzle can be solved. I begin each book as uncertain of myself as I was when I first began.

Treat Every Novel as a New Learning Experience

Every single book I’ve written has been its own adventure. After those first four novels—and the trials and travails that accompanied learning the foundations of the craft—I ‘ve now realized that every new book presents its own complicated set of difficulties. Perhaps I was able to master the lessons taught by one novel—but the next novel will almost certainly offer a completely different set of demands.

At first glance, this might all seem dreadfully depressing.

“You mean to tell me I’m going to go through this kind of mental distress and labor on every book?”

Yep.

“The struggles are never going to end?”

Nope.

“Twenty years from now, I’m still going to grubbing along, agonizing over word choice and story structure?”

Yep. And ain’t it grand?

The Beauty of Struggle

In his wonderfully encouraging Booklife, fantasy author Jeff VanderMeer explains that the glory is in the struggle:

Because you are uncertain, despite having mastery, you know that your writing is still alive, that you are not simply doomed to repeat the same path you chose so many times before. Because you feel once again as if you are writing your first book, you know that writing is still meaningful to you.

A writing life without any challenges would hardly be worth the effort, would it?

Recognizing, and even appreciating, the fact that writing never gets any easier, frees us from the doubt, and even guilt, of feeling we’ll never be good enough—because the truth is we won’t. We’ll never be perfect, but we can always be better.

So, here’s to Novel #9, and a brand new round of lessons to be learned, mountains to be climbed, and story tactics to be mastered!

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! Has your writing become easier or more difficult with time? Tell me in the comments!

Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast or Amazon Music).

___

Love Helping Writers Become Authors? You can now become a patron. (Huge thanks to those of you who are already part of my Patreon family!)