Things No One Tells You About Writing a Book
There is no shortage of advice about how to write a book. The shelves are full of it. The internet has approximately twelve million articles on the subject, and most of them say roughly the same things: start with character, understand your structure, write every day, trust the process. Good advice, more or less. Useful advice, depending on where you are.
But there is a different category of things — things that are true about writing a book that nobody quite prepares you for. Not because they're secret, exactly, but because they're hard to explain before you've experienced them, and easy to forget once you've been through them enough times that they feel normal. I've been writing for sixteen years. I've forgotten more of these things than I'd like to admit. So here, in no particular order, are the ones worth remembering.
The Middle Is Always a Swamp
Every writer I know hits a point in the middle of a manuscript — usually somewhere around the 40 to 60 percent mark — where the book stops feeling like an exciting journey and starts feeling like a bad decision. The beginning had momentum. The ending has gravity. The middle has neither, and it's the largest single section of the book. It requires you to sustain a story that hasn't paid off yet, advance a plot that doesn't have the energy of a beginning or the pull of an ending, and do it for tens of thousands of words. The craft books acknowledge this with phrases like 'the sagging middle.' What they don't quite convey is how personally the middle feels like an indictment. Like maybe the idea wasn't as good as you thought. Like maybe you aren't as good as you thought. Almost every author who has finished a book knows this feeling, and almost none of them tell you about it until after you've experienced it yourself. Now you know. When you hit the swamp, you haven't failed. You've arrived at the place every book goes through.
The First Draft Is Supposed to Be Bad
This one gets said frequently, but it doesn't fully land until you've written a first draft and been genuinely horrified by it. Anne Lamott called it the 'shitty first draft,' and she was right — but knowing the phrase and experiencing the reality are different things. The gap between the book in your head and the book on the page is one of the most disorienting experiences in writing. The vision is complete and cinematic and alive. The draft is clunky and over-explained and full of scenes that go nowhere. This is not a sign that you can't write. It is the entirely normal distance between conception and execution that every writer closes through revision. The first draft's job is not to be good. Its job is to exist so you have something to improve.
Your Favorite Part Will Probably Get Cut
There will be a scene, or a chapter, or a passage of dialogue that you love deeply — that feels like the best thing you've written, that you're quietly proud of, that you look forward to reaching every time you sit down to write. And there is a meaningful chance that this passage will be the first thing a good editor tells you to cut. This is because the things we love most in our own work are often the things that feel most personally expressive to us, which is not always the same as what serves the story. The purple passage. The digression that reveals too much of the author's enthusiasm for a subject the reader doesn't share. The clever structural trick that calls attention to itself. Learning to cut your favorite parts — or at least to hold them lightly enough to consider cutting — is one of the specific skills of mature writing that takes years to develop and never stops feeling like a small amputation.
Finishing Feels Different Than You Imagined
Most writers, before they've finished their first book, have a mental image of what finishing will feel like. Triumphant, probably. A moment of arrival. Something worth celebrating. The actual experience is frequently... quieter than that. Many writers finish a first draft and feel a strange deflation rather than elation. The story that has been living in your head for months or years suddenly has an ending, and the absence of that open narrative space can feel like losing something rather than gaining something. Others feel a kind of numb satisfaction — they know it's done, they know it's significant, but the emotion doesn't arrive on cue. The celebration, when it comes, is often retrospective. Give yourself time to feel whatever you actually feel at the end, rather than the feeling you expected to have.
The Book Will Change You
This sounds dramatic, and it is, but it's also just true. Writing a book — really writing one, all the way through — is one of the more intimate things a person can do. You spend months or years in a sustained, concentrated act of imagination and articulation. You make thousands of small decisions about what matters and what doesn't, about what people are like, about what stories are worth telling. This changes how you read, how you think, how you see the work of other writers. It also frequently surfaces things about yourself that you didn't entirely know were there. Characters express things their authors didn't plan to express. Themes emerge that the author wasn't consciously exploring. Most writers look back at their early work and find things they didn't know they believed. This is one of the genuinely valuable things about writing that has nothing to do with publication or sales.
Other People Won't Get It
When you tell someone you're writing a book, you will encounter a range of responses. Some people will be genuinely interested and supportive. Many will be politely interested for approximately ninety seconds and then move on to other topics. Some will ask when it will be finished in a tone that implies they expect an answer you cannot give. A few will suggest plot ideas, which is well-intentioned and also slightly maddening. Almost none of them will understand what the actual process is like, what it demands of you, or why you're doing it. This is not a criticism of the people in your life. Writing a book is a strange and solitary endeavor, and most people who haven't done it have no frame of reference for it. Find the people who do understand — a writing group, an online community, another writer at roughly your stage — and let them carry the weight of the conversations about process that your other relationships can't hold.
The Book You Finish Won't Be the Book You Planned
The outline, if you made one, will be wrong about something important. A character who was supposed to be minor will demand more space. A plot thread you were excited about will reveal itself as unnecessary once you're inside the story. The ending you planned will turn out to require a different ending to be honest. This is not a failure of planning — it is the nature of sustained creative work. You learn things during the writing that you could not have known before the writing. The book teaches you what it needs to be, and your job is to be responsive to that teaching rather than defensive of the plan. The writers who are most attached to their outlines often produce the most technically correct and the least alive manuscripts.
Nobody Can Tell You If It's Good
Beta readers will disagree with each other. Editors will see different things. Early readers will respond emotionally to things that later readers don't notice. You will re-read your own work and find it brilliant one week and mediocre the next. There is no moment of external validation that definitively answers the question of whether the book is good. What there is: feedback that helps you see what's working and what isn't, readers who respond to the work in the way you hoped, and, eventually, your own increasingly reliable instincts about the difference between a problem and a preference. Learning to navigate the noise of feedback is one of the longer projects of a writing career.
The Pride Is Real Even When the Sales Aren't
Here is the last thing, and I mean it sincerely. The pride you will feel when you hold a finished book that you wrote — a book that exists in the world because you made it exist, that has your name on the cover, that someone somewhere might read and be changed by — that pride is real and it is earned and it belongs to you regardless of what happens afterward. Not every book sells well. Most don't. The market is large and loud and difficult to navigate, and success in it is not a reliable measure of quality or effort or the worth of what you made. The book matters. The fact that you finished it matters. What ScribeCount can tell you is how it's performing commercially, which is useful information for running a publishing business. What no dashboard can tell you is what you accomplished by writing it.
These are the things nobody quite says. Consider yourself warned, and consider yourself prepared. The swamp is real, the pride is realer, and somewhere in between those two things is the experience of writing a book — which is one of the stranger and more worthwhile things a person can spend their time doing.
Hello, I'm Randall Wood. When I'm not pounding the keyboard or entertaining my giant dog I like to build tools for my fellow indie authors. In these articles, you'll find lessons learned over sixteen years spent in the indie author world. I share it all here to help you get one step closer to where you want to be.— Randall