What changed about you or your approach to writing that helped you cross the threshold from “dreadful” to “passable?”
You know, I would say that there are hundreds of little eureka moments all along the way. Figuring out how to make characters work and not have them be just caricatures. Figuring out how to make a plot twist pop off the page at the end. Figuring out how to make the magic system work. Each of those is a little Eureka moment for me.
Putting it all together over time and learning how to revise takes effort. Learning to write a book is a lot closer to learning to hit a baseball than people realize. I talk about the process a lot, but that’s me analyzing it after the fact. When a batter gets up there to swing at a ball, they’ve practiced tons and tons and tons. They’ve gone over fundamentals and learned what those fundamentals need to be. They might think about that for a minute, but when they swing, it all just clicks and they swing at the ball.
That’s actually what writers do a lot of times when they’re writing a story. Yes, they’ve practiced the fundamentals, and they’ve written a lot before, but when they sit down to write a story, they just let it flow and the muscle memory takes over. After the fact, you go back and look at it and revise it and try to figure out what you’re doing wrong, but there’s more instinct to this—instinct born of practice—than people assume.
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