My Misbeliefs About Novel Writing

I joined my first writers group more than 30 years ago. I’d written a Star Trek novel (the first novel I’d completed but not the first I’d started) and was playing around with a short story. I was looking for some accountability—regular deadlines for submitting to the group—plus some feedback.

Although I had a master’s in English literature by then, that didn’t help me write fiction. I could analyze it as a scholar but not yet as a writer. On my own, I couldn’t figure out how fiction was made, though I thought I should be able to.

Why? Because I had the persistent misbelief that “good” writers work alone. (See Lisa Cron’s explanation of a misbelief, and check out her books Wired for Story and Story Genius.)

Then a grad school friend invited me to her writers group. It was an eclectic group of women, all older than I was and definitely more experienced at writing fiction. A couple of them had published a short story or two. Some wrote for kids, some for adults. Some wrote realistic, contemporary, some speculative fiction.

Listening to them talk about what worked and what didn’t in a particular piece of writing was interesting, but there were times I didn’t know what they were talking about. It felt like I was wandering around in a heavy fog, able to glimpse the occasional shape of someone but not the details.

I knew I needed to learn more about writing, and since I love to read, I turned first to books on craft. Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write was one of them. Reading about writing doesn’t substitute for doing the work of writing, however.   

So I enrolled in an undergraduate course in writing fiction at Iowa State University with Lee Hadley (half of the Hadley Irwin writing team, who wrote several MG/YA “problem” novels). This was in the mid-1990s. I don’t recall anything I wrote for that class or even if I’d settled on writing for kids yet. I do recall yearning for feedback on my work, feedback that told me my work was brilliant—or at least good.  

I was suffering from another misbelief—that writers are born, not made.

Looking back, I can see how much I still had to learn about fiction writing. I didn’t spring from the womb understanding how to craft compelling stories. I had to learn it and work at it. Fortunately for all of us who aspire to publish novels, fiction writing is a learnable craft. And there are multiple ways to learn it.

Book coaching is one way. Learn more about my approach to book coaching.

If you’d like a free taste of it, schedule a call with me to talk about your writing.