What? There's No Secret Formula?

We blog a lot here about our process and things that have worked or not worked for us as we travel along this journey, and as you can tell from reading our different perspectives, there are many ways to write a book, and what works for one person may not work for someone else.  I get that. But what never occurred to me is that there is more than one way for me to write a book.

I guess I thought that once you wrote a book, at least once you wrote a book that was published, then you'd know how to write a book, and the next one would be easier.  Like there's some secret formula that you discover that you can use over and over.  

There's not.

Cue the rage.

You mean the second book is just as hard to write as the first?  HARDER?

Okay, but the third one, by that one, I'll know what I'm doing right?  I'll have learned the SECRET to writing a novel.

Nope.  Not even close.

There is no secret formula for writing a book.  There are tools we can learn to use, structures that help us shape the plot, story elements we can incorporate, but every story has it's own journey from inception to ever after.  And like every journey, a story has it's own obstacles and conflict before we get to the eventual resolution.  Some obstacles are easier to overcome than others, but I am increasingly certain that it's those obstacles that make the journey worthwhile.

Let's be honest. None of us want to write a formulaic book.  None of us want to write the same story over and over again. And as much as I'd love for a perfect first draft to magically spring from my fingertips (C'mon Bret, surely you've developed a product for that by now), it's the time, pain and bloodletting involved in the writing process that make the final product so satisfying.

For every day where opening the document feels like an insurmountable task, there is another where I can't get the characters out of my head.  For every day that it takes me six hours to scrape together 600 words, there is a day where a scene appears on the page out of nowhere that is so perfect and surprising that it makes me fall in love with the story all over again.  For every moment that I hate writing, there are a hundred more where I wonder how I ever survived without it. 

Writing is hard.  It doesn't get easier.  But maybe that's just art's way of making sure we don't take it for granted.  Maybe it's art's way of telling us that we are more than the sum of our parts.

And we are.  We are writers.