The Hard Truths of Writing

Before I begin, I think it’s best that I elaborate on my experiences with writing. There are plenty of people who make their living telling other people what to do without any real experience of themselves. Besides that, knowing my experience will help you understand my later points in this essay. You can determine for yourself what to take seriously and what is the bias of my own circumstances. 

So, I have been writing seriously for around eight years now. Four of those were spent tinkering on projects that never went anywhere, and three were spent on a single project that also never went anywhere. It is only recently that I have begun publishing. My first novel is called The Matrioshka Divide and released for sale only about two weeks ago. Littered among those years are a number of short stories—some of which are published right here on this substack. 

Now, I know it isn’t the most astounding record, but it should prove valuable to the would-be writer. Judging from this timeline, you might claim that I don’t know much about actually completing a project. And you might be right. But I do know everything that prevents you from finishing yours, and I might just be able to help you. 

This essay is meant to outline the process of writing and what it actually entails. I want this to serve as a map for those who want to enter this world so that they do not go in blind. I want to point out the traps that catch the uninitiated, and the traps that still sometimes catch me. Through this, I want to help people set their own goals by understanding the landscape of writing and what is achievable in it. So, without further ado, let’s dive in. 

The first hard truth of writing is that it is work. Don’t get me wrong, there are many enjoyable aspects of writing, just like many other professions. But just like those many other professions, there are also long hours of tedium. You’ll find yourself stuck on scenes that just aren’t working. You’ll have to push past segments that, while exciting to the reader, may seem utterly boring to you. And most important of all, you’ll have to edit. Oh boy, I know you are just going to love editing. 

I consider this first part what separates the true writers from the wannabes. This is the most difficult part of all, and it is unfortunately going to fall upon yourself. If you want to master your craft, that will require consistent effort upon your part. You will have to do this regularly. It might be a few hours a day or maybe just once a week. I will tell you that any less than that will dramatically reduce the scope of what you are able to accomplish. 

The great piece of fiction is not written in a few weeks—it takes years of practice. It is built on the foundation of all the other projects that came before it. Those seven years I spent were not entirely wasted. The blood and sweat made me a better writer than I was.

So, I want you to align your goals accordingly. Ask yourself, what can you do? Not what you think you can do, but I want you to take an honest assessment of what your real output is. However you manage to get it done, how much can you write and how consistently? From there, it’s up to you to decide where to allocate your time. 

If you can write five hundred words a day, you can be looking at a decently sized novel within half a year. If it’s less than that, understand that large projects will take you a very long time. I’m not telling you not to do it, but I am deeply cautioning the person who tries a write a fantasy epic and can’t manage a hundred words a week. If your output is on the lesser side, focus on short stories. Not only are they going to be more manageable projects, but over time you will soon be looking at a number of finished works in comparison to one large unfinished one. 

And that leads to the next hard truth. You need to actually finish your work at some point. I know that sounds ridiculous on paper, but that it was stopped me from releasing anything in the past seven years. I always went back and kept revising, kept changing ideas, and kept throwing away manuscripts. For many people, there is a strong urge to endlessly tinker on a manuscript until it’s “perfect”.

That way, when they release it to the public, everyone will like it, and it will be a huge success. That’s what they think anyway. First, perfection is not possible. Second, it’s the death of getting anything done. Push through. Finish a project—any project. Just get something done, and despite what you may think is imperfect, put it out there. 

That is for two reasons. Number one is that it will help you get criticism on what you’re doing. I’ll probably do a separate article on how to take criticism, but any serious writer needs to look at what people are taking away from the text and look for any major flaws. However, the second reason is even more important. 

When you put your work out in the public venue, you gather an audience. That’s critical because an audience is not built up by releasing your masterpiece one day and expecting everyone to gush over it. Very few people are willing to take a shot on an unknown piece of fiction. You’ll find yourself trying to get attention for a work that nobody seems interested in reading. But over the months and years, you will find people who enjoy your projects, and they will gather to you. 

Even though your work may not be perfect, you will find that some people who will like your fiction and stick by you. Your task is to get better at what you produce and build an audience who likes what you make. That is the key to become successful. While I’m still in the early stages of building an audience, I do wish that I had released my work publicly long ago. 

You will also find that putting out work to an audience is helpful to your writing in that it serves as a good motivator. I find this to be a double-edged sword as some people become more anxious about their work the larger their audience expands. But for myself, receiving good feedback and knowing people actually liked what I was writing helped me finish Matrioshka in the first place. Had I not exposed it to the public, my self-doubt would’ve crushed the project like many of the others that I have done in the past. 

I want to pivot for my next point. This issue is a far more specific one, but I see it hurting a lot of people in the production stage. The hard truth is that world building is not a story. Don’t get me wrong, everybody loves cool lore. However, that alone cannot make a story. I see so many people discussing their worlds and ideas, and they get trapped in constantly revising those ideas before they ever set pen to paper. I’m not disparaging those who like world building for the sake of world building, but if your goal is to write a story, then at some point you need to actually write the story. 

Don’t get caught up in discussing details or lore. The purpose of world building is to accentuate and develop the narrative—not the other way around. For myself, I think of the story first and then do the world building second. I think of the plot line, the aesthetics I want to have, and I note down characters. Hash out a clear vision of what your work is going to be, and then add the world building to reinforce it. 

I know of the outline vs. gardener approach that George R. R. Martin advocates, but I think it’s essential that you know fundamentally what you are going to do. Even though Martin let the characters and plots develop organically, he still had a vision of Westeros from the beginning. A Song of Ice and Fire was conceived as a more “realistic response” to The Lord of the Rings. It might not have been a good vision, but he knew what he was going for from the beginning. Knowing that, he built a world expressed on a Machiavellian view and layered it into the narrative to reinforce the themes. 

This will probably be the subject of a later essay, but these things do matter quite a bit. To prove my point, I want to think of a revenge story and then place it into two different genres, like fantasy or cyberpunk. While the basic plot structure might be the same, the elements surrounding the plot draw out different aspects. For example, the cyberpunk world could be made to reinforce the inhumanity of the revenge, and the cold, machine-like nature of the brutal world. In which case, you can develop the world building to accentuate that specific angle and layer it throughout the entire narrative. 

I’m getting a bit off track, but I hope you see what I’m saying. I do want to keep this article somewhat concise, so I will end it here. I will probably do a part two of this article to cover some more fundamentals in the writing process.