Making Writing Easy? · P2P Author Business Harbor

Making Writing Easy?

The final book in my first trilogy was one of the hardest things I’ve ever written. It was intensely personal, and the story I really needed to finish before I could even think of a writing career.

And the experience taught me so much.

Think about the hardest thing you've ever written. Not the longest. The hardest. The one where you deleted eleven thousand words. The one where you sat in the car in the parking lot for twenty minutes because you finally understood what the book was actually about and it was about something you didn't want to see.

Now: would you trade that experience for a version where the pages arrived clean and easy and on time?

Be honest. Not the answer that makes you sound like a serious artist. The true answer. Because deadlines are real and rent is real and I'm not going to sit here and pretend that suffering is a virtue when you’ve also got to pay a mortgage.

But here's the follow-up, and it's the one that actually matters: would you be the writer you are now without the experience you gained from that draft?

I don't think I would be. I think that draft is where I learned the thing I’ve used in every book since.

So what did the hard one teach you? And — this is the part I really want to know — is there any version of you that could have somehow learned it the easy way?

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Making Writing Easy?