Writing a Book is Hard!

Writing a book is hard work. Really hard. Much harder than I thought it would be. Big deal, you say? Anyone should know writing a book is hard work. So did I… once. But then I was lulled into a false sense of security. I told myself writing was easy.

Let me explain. Back when I thought I hated writing of any kind, I thought that writing a book was probably the hardest thing in the world to do. Who could possibly combine that many words and put them to paper without driving themselves to tears? I had a lot of respect for authors of books. (Actually, I still do.)

But I kind of forgot about that when I first started out to write my Hogwarts book. Actually, it didn’t start out as a book. I was just trying to take all the ideas that were bouncing around inside my head and put them together into some sort of coherent framework. One of the reasons I decided to actually turn this into a book was because I was developing so many ideas so quickly I was not having any trouble filling up pages. Writing was easy!

Of course, back then my book read more like an outline than a real book. What I considered my story was nothing more than simple descriptions of what happened in each chapter. No details, no descriptions, and very little dialogue. I was condensing what should have been a 25 page chapter into 5 pages of text. I had no idea what I was doing.

So now I’m beefing the story up with details, adding dialogue and beats, and trying in general to make it enjoyable for others to read.

Now I realize just how much work it is to write a book.

What makes this even harder is the size of the book. I’m already well over 400 pages now and by the time I finish I’m sure I will be closer to 600 pages, if not more. Considering that the first two Harry Potter books were each about 300 pages long, this is a scarily large project to be tackling as a newbie, especially since I’m trying to teach myself how to write fiction at the same time.

Coming up with ideas is easy for me. Putting it down on paper is the hard part.

Writing a book is hard. But it's fun too.