Not writing advice. Just talking about writing.

There Is No Writing Hack

There is no secret. You have to write, fail, write, fail…

My first novel was published by Northside Press in the early 1990s. Okay yeah, that was just the name of my elementary school at the time.

You write, you fail, you write some more. There is no secret. Writing is work, it’s repetition and hours upon hours of thinking. You fail until you succeed. This is not revelatory.

There is no secret to making your writing better or to being published. The internet wants you to click on things that are “hacks” or “secrets,” but the truth is you have to write and edit, write and edit, and keep going when you feel like stopping sometimes.

Sure, there are ways to make the process feel less horrible, or to get your writing in front of people, or even to ensure the stupid machine of the internet shares your work more efficiently.

Writing is hard work. You’ll doubt yourself, you’ll doubt your writing, and you’ll even doubt what other people are telling you about your work, whether it’s positive or negative.

The best, most concise advice about writing is something Stephen King said in his fantastic book On Writing.

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”