The Hardest Thing About Writing a Book

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From Medium:

All my life I wanted to write a book. At first I wrote four books that agents and publishers all rejected.

I thought the hard part was getting a book accepted. Having someone like me.

But this wasn’t the hard part at all. Anyone who is persistent will get that part done.

These were the hard parts. So hard it’s probably cost me years of my life and definitely much happiness.

But I survived. And you can also. Awareness is the key.

A) SITTING

Writing is boring. It’s unnatural. It’s basically sitting and staring at a scream and typing into a keyboard.

Three activities that our ancient ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years never did. We did not evolve in order to write books.

. . . .

B) NO DISTRACTIONS

Because of the above, I always had to create an environment of zero distractions.

For my very first book, my family went to stay with my in-laws and I spent two weeks locked in my house and did nothing but write.

I turned off Internet, no TV, nothing. Just wrote. This was very hard. I’m too used to being distracted. It’s natural to be distracted.

Link to the rest at Medium

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13 thoughts on “The Hardest Thing About Writing a Book”

  1. Looks like the author of this article doesn’t know anything about writing. If he/she is bored writing, imagine how the readers feel!

    Writing is many things, but boring is not one of them. Many of the tasks associated with publishing can be boring, but if you’re lucky (or have spare funds) you can hire someone to do those things for you.

  2. The only thing that bores me is the proofing/editing stage because it is a long and painful process. But once that’s over, I find it exciting to work on covers, scheduling promotions and hitting PUBLISH.

  4. A) Ah, they are bored trying to write — perhaps they’ll be less bored doing something else.

    B) Bored from ‘A’, their mind easily wanders away without them.

    C) At least they know there should be a ‘story’ in there somewhere.

    D) Looks like they’ve never heard of ebooks, just talks of needing a ‘professional designer’ to make the inside(?) and outside covers — and that you ‘must’ do audio, that’s where the money is!
    “Many books require a foreign rights agent. And a speaking agent to create the most opportunities for your book.”

    E) “Dealing with that psychology is painful.” ??

    F) Oh – Buy My Book! We finally get to the heart of the matter.

  5. “A story is a reluctant hero who gets inspired. Obstacles along the way until the FINAL CONFLICT. And then the journey home. A hero.”

    “There’s many variations on that. Just like there’s variations on how to make a good cake. But the basic rules are followed.”

    No. Stories don’t have to be about heroes. They don’t have to be reluctant. And they don’t have to have a journey home. They don’t even have to have a FINAL CONFLICT. I suppose you can argue they all have “obstacles” since that’s so vague, but even that’s questionable.

    Just to pick one example, since it’s often on the list of great novels, in The Great Gatsby, none of the characters can adequately be described as reluctant heroes (Gatsby’s biggest problem is probably that he isn’t reluctant to take chances and pursue adventure). Nick is not remotely heroic and the other major characters are more antagonists. There is no journey home. (In fact, it might be more common for stories to imply characters can never return home.) It’s arguable if there is a final conflict, I would say the ending is actually a series of events that prevent a final conflict, resulting in the death of a character whose goals are poetically unresolved.

    There are many different types of story forms. The reluctant hero journey is only one of them, and probably not the best one. Trying to fit every story into that model is a mistake and is often why beginning writer’s works seem so cookie cutter.

    The differences between different genres of stories, like romance, sci-fi, thriller, horror, etc. are more important than the vague similarities (they generally are about people, something happens, etc.).

    For example, I only recently read about the “Brave Little Tailor” trope, but it really opened up an understanding for me about the structure of many sci-fi stories.

    • Yeah, I don’t find the writing process boring. It’s all the stuff you have to do after you write the book that bores me. Not editing, but putting the book into various formats and uploading to various places for sale. I’m in that mode right now and I hate it. Except that at the end there’s another book of mine for sale. One more and my series will be finished… hoping to make it before my birthday in November.

    • writing is boring

      I had to read this sentence a couple of times. It. Doesn’t. Make. Sense.

      Since the OP also refers to staring at a “scream” I’m going to guess this is a rough draft and he meant to write some other words entirely.

      Writing is boring??? Just say “no” to drugs, people.

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