292. The Gap Every First-Time Writer Needs to Cross

You can Google anything about writing. Ask AI. Read every craft book on the shelf. And still sit down to your own pages and feel exactly as stuck as before.

It's not a lack of talent. Or motivation. It's the gap between having a story you're desperate to write and knowing how to write it.

This episode is about why that gap is so easy to miss, why the excitement of a new project always seems to run out at the same point, and why more information isn't necessarily what you need to get unstuck.

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Nanci 0:55

What's stopping you from finishing your book? Some of you said you've thrown yourself into a big writing push before. You've gotten excited, you've made real progress, and then lost steam part way through. So now you're hesitant to fully commit to this story again. Because what if the same thing happens? And some of you said you're stuck on material. Either you don't feel like you have enough yet to really dig into the story, to really commit to the story, or you've gotten so much, so many threads, so much character history that you're not sure how to navigate it. And the standard advice doesn't seem to apply or even help. Both of these are real concerns, and they're very common. But I've started to notice something underneath both of these roadblocks, and I think it has a lot to do with something we almost never talk about when we talk about writing a book. The gap between knowing about writing and actually knowing how to do it well. Think about a great actor, someone like Jesse Buckley or Emma Stone. There's a reason these are Oscar winners. They're so good and so believable, you don't see the technique at all. You're just fully there watching a very human experience. That's the whole trick. The skill is invisible. So underneath that seemingly ordinary conversation or emotional moment, the actor is working with intention. There's subtext, there's timing, it's what her character wants, it's what she's willing to reveal, what she's trying to protect. But we don't see any of that. They make it look easy. We just see the human behind it. And writing works the same way. When a novel or memoir is working, we don't notice the craft. We're completely absorbed. We don't see the hundreds of decisions the writer made to create the experience we're having. We're not thinking, look how beautifully she escalated that conflict, or wow, that was a great midpoint. That was a great act, too. We're thinking, what is she going to do now? What is she going to do next? We don't notice the work, we don't notice the craft. We just keep turning pages. And I think that invisibility to craft that's behind the pages, the years of practice is part of what gets writers stuck. Here's the thing about writing that makes it different from acting or guitar or almost anything we'd immediately recognize as a skill we don't have yet. Writing is something we already know how to do at a basic level before we ever attempt a novel or memoir. We've been doing it our whole lives. We can write a sentence, we can write an email, we write in our journals, we can tell a friend what happened yesterday, and it comes out as a story with a beginning and a turn and an ending that really lands. And most of us who want to write books have also spent years reading them, which is usually part of why we wanted to write one in the first place. So somewhere along the way, it's easy to think I should be able to do this too. There's no visible gap the way there is with a skill you've clearly never practiced. Nobody listens to John Mayer and thinks, I've listened to music my whole life, hand me the guitar. Nobody watches an Olympic skier and thinks, I've watched enough skiing, give me the skis. We can see the gap between what they're doing and what we know how to do. With writing, it's harder because we already own the instrument. The gap is just as real, it's only harder to see. And then we sit down to write a book and discover that writing one is a whole different animal from reading one. You can be a voracious, sophisticated reader and still not know how to navigate the page yet. That's not a contradiction. That's what learning any craft looks like from the inside. And this brings me to that first answer I heard from writers, the fear of losing steam. You've done this before, you got excited, you made real progress, and then part way through the energy disappeared. So, what's going to make this time any different? I think one reason that happens is that in the beginning, everything you learn feels like progress. You pick up a new idea about pacing or character development, and it feels like a breakthrough because it is a breakthrough. You didn't know before, now you do. That feeling of discovery can carry you for a while. And today we have more access to information than writers have ever had. You can Google something, you can watch a tutorial on YouTube, you can read a craft book, you can ask AI, and you can get an answer in seconds. But suppose I ask AI what a great guitarist is doing with his hands when he plays. I'll get an answer. There's finger style technique, there's chord embellishments, hammer-ons, pull-offs, phrasing, timing. Great, hand me the guitar, but you don't want to hear what happens next. I have information about playing guitar. I do not have the skill of playing guitar. And that's the distinction I think matters for writers. At some point, the easy discoveries start to run out. And now it isn't just about acquiring another piece of information, it's about taking what you've learned and applying it to your specific pages. It's discernment. Let's say the middle of your novel is dragging. Well, today you can Google it, you can ask AI, and you'll get a perfectly reasonable list of possibilities. It could be pacing, it could be stakes, it could be a character who isn't driving the action, it could be a subplot pulling focus, it could be repetitive conflict that isn't escalating. All true, all possible. You might even get help identifying which one is showing up in your pages. But then you still have to decide whether that diagnosis fits. You have to understand what changing it will affect elsewhere in your book. And you have to make the choice that belongs to your story. That's where information stops being enough. And I think this is one reason the steam can run out. The excitement can really wane. You've reached the point where more information isn't necessarily going to move the book forward. Now you have to apply what you know to your own pages. You have to make decisions. And that judgment, that discernment, that ability to make choices is a different skill. It's something you build. You're not supposed to already have the skill of writing. You build it. And this brings me to what I hear from writers. One writer tells me she's great at starting, she gets an idea, writes the opening, rides that energy for a few chapters, then she runs out of steam. So she goes back, she revises what she has, then revises it again. Eventually, she reaches what sounds like a perfectly reasonable conclusion. I just don't have enough material yet. I need to write more first. And sometimes that's true. Sometimes you really do just need to sit down and generate more pages. But what if you keep trying to do that and can't seem to get any further? What if you keep returning to the pages you already have because those are the pages you know what to do with? Well, then I'd ask a different question. What's actually keeping you from going further? Because maybe you don't need to accumulate more material before you can begin figuring out your story. Maybe figuring out how to develop the material you already have is what allows you to create more. And then there are writers at the exact opposite extreme. They have so much material. It's a family saga spanning generations, years of historical research, multiple characters, multiple points of view, multiple timelines, multiple subplots. And they start thinking, my story is too complicated for the usual advice. My book is different. Maybe it is complicated, but complexity doesn't make your judgment or your decisions less necessary. It makes it more necessary. Because a book was never meant to hold everything you know. At some point, you have to decide this matters, this doesn't, this character belongs, this subplot doesn't. This piece of backstory earns its place, this one doesn't. And those aren't decisions somebody can make for you with a checklist. They're decisions you learn how to make on your own. Notice what these two writers are actually facing. One thinks she doesn't have enough, the other thinks she has too much, but underneath both is the same task. Learning how to make decisions about the material you already have. And this is where I'll just figure it out as I go can get tricky. Sometimes that's exactly what you should do. You don't need to know everything about your book before you start writing it. You don't need every decision made. You don't need certainty. But there's a point where I'll figure it out as I go stops being freedom and starts becoming a way of staying in the same place. And more information won't necessarily get you out of that stuck place. Neither will simply writing more pages if you keep running into the same wall. At some point, you have to learn how to make the decisions that move the story forward. So I don't think the answer is to stop learning or stop researching or stop reading craft books. And I definitely don't think the answer is to stop using AI. Use them. They're useful, but don't confuse access to information with having developed the skill. Learning and doing were never supposed to happen separately. You learn something, you try it, you see what happens on the page, you start recognizing things you couldn't see before. You make a better decision than you made last time. Then you do it again. And eventually something that once felt impossibly complicated starts to feel more natural. Not because it was easy all along, because you got better at it. That's what we don't see when we watch a great actor or musician. We don't see everything that had to be learned and practiced before it could look that natural. We're seeing what the work eventually made possible. I think we owe ourselves that same patience when we're learning to write a book. You don't have to know everything before you start. You don't have to figure it all out alone. But at some point, you do have to become the person who can look at five possible directions for your story and know which one belongs in this book. That's what mastery starts to look like. The choices don't disappear. You just get better at making them until one day somebody reads your book and thinks, wow, she makes this look easy. So there you have it. Thanks for hanging out with me today. If you know any writers who need some support in their writing, please share this episode or the Writer Unleash podcast in general. And if you love what you're listening to, subscribe on your favorite listening platform. And if you're listening on Apple, please leave me a review. Reading how this podcast impacts your writing truly lights me up and helps me create topics for the show. Till next time, keep writing and I'll talk to you soon.