I ran across a comment by a very successful author about how hard it was for them to write each book, successively. It was part of a larger conversation, but I wanted to pause for a minute and answer this question I see a lot from writers who thought it should get easier with each book.
(And to be fair, as with everything, for some people, it does actually get easier with each book. But not for everyone.)
Here are some reasons why.
- You push yourself to get better with each book, so when you find yourself doing things that are old patterns, you keep trying to improve (thus, slowing down or making the process more difficult in the moment… but the outcome is, you do actually get better, even when you don’t feel it).
- Your brain is wired like a bread machine, so the easier books to work on are the ones where you’ve had more time to put all the ingredients inside the machine and let it sit for a long time. But when you become a professional writer (even if you’re not writing full-time), you don’t get to spend years thinking about a book, unless you’re GRRM. So when you take away part of the way your brain functions creatively best, it becomes more and more difficult to complete the process.
- You get bored quickly. The longer you write in one genre, the more your ideas seem boring or old. The more books you write, the more likely you’ve done “a version” of the story you might want to tell.
- You’re exceptionally hard on yourself. So the process of writing gets longer and more difficult because you find more and more ways to be hard on yourself. (This isn’t a bad thing, by the way. Not everyone needs to go easy on themselves.)
- The pressure becomes too much. The more you try to make a living from creative endeavor, the more you put pressure on that creativity. If you’re not making enough money on previous releases, it will become more difficult to write future books.
- The response to the last book wasn’t what you wanted. You didn’t take off, readers didn’t love it enough, it didn’t make enough. But each time you think about how the previous book did, it slows you down.
- You get burned out or tired. The harder you work yourself, and the less you take care of yourself, the more likely your creativity will suffer, progressively.
- There’s more work to do, the more success you find. When you first started, you might have been only writing. Now, you’re running a multi-national corporation (sometimes with staffing). You’re not the same person you were when you were “just writing.”
- There’s too much attention on your writing process. You’re on social media a lot so you see other writers talking about their process and you think, “this should be easier” so you keep trying to change your process to fit what seems to be working for others. (Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad trait. I just see it happen very quickly when the process gets hard.)
There are others, but these are the main ones I’ve seen in my years coaching some of the best in the business.
ETA: Here are a few more that commenters have suggested which also come up frequently.
- Life changes on you. What used to work for you can’t work anymore because bio/social/life changes have caused your whole process to need to shift. (Gestures around at the world and the industry…)
- Mental health.
- Publisher expectations are different from the expectations you have for what you’d like to write. Trying to write something you don’t want to write when something you do want to write is calling to you… Yeah. Again, we don’t talk about this enough.
- As you write farther into a world/series, each book gets harder and more complex to keep aligned to the world. Additionally, as one writer brought up, the final book is often the hardest, when you’re finishing a series. I see this a lot with final books in complicated worlds. “Why does this take so long” when you have 50 loops to close… that’s why.
Thanks tot he author who brought this up. It’s an important conversation we forget to have.
– Becca
I feel like I relate to almost all of these. Do you have any suggestions to wiggle out of these thoughts or a different way of reframing them?