Episode 7 - I need to hurry up

This story can sound reasonable or realistic.

After all, time is real.

Writing a book takes a long time.

Building a writing career takes even longer.

So you start to do calculations.

If it takes you two or three years to write a book, then another year or two for publishing, and then you need to write the next one, suddenly the timeline stretches out in front of you in a way that can feel a little alarming.

You start thinking about how old you'll be when the next book is finished, then how old you'll be if that book doesn't actually work, and then you need to write another.

Before long, writing starts to feel less like a creative process and more like something you have to do and get done as quickly as humanly possible.

Part of what makes this story powerful is that writing does not offer very many clear signals of progress.

In other professions, advancement is visible.

Maybe you get promoted, or you earn more money, or your role changes.

Writing is not like that.

You can spend years improving your craft, developing ideas, drafting and redrafting a book, and from the outside, it looks like nothing's really happened at all, which makes it very easy to interpret time passing as evidence of a kind of failure.

Everyone else is moving ahead, and I am standing still.

But you can be progressing even when it doesn't look like it.

A lot of writing happens below the surface.

Sometimes you're learning basic mechanics of story, structure, character pacing.

But later on, when you know those things, deeper work continues.

In every book, you have to learn to recognize when scenes aren't doing what you'd hoped.

You have to be able to reshape a project that just isn't landing, and to make better and better decisions about what belongs in a story and what doesn't.

In other words, you are developing and continuing to develop skill and judgment and taste, and that takes time.

Those things are built slowly across many drafts and many projects through reading and writing and revising, and occasionally realizing you were wrong about something you once felt certain about.

From the outside, it doesn't look like much, but from the inside, it's how you get good, really good, which is kind of the goal, remember? The other thing that fuels this story is comparison.