I have a book that I've been working on for about three years now. Probably closer to four. I wasn't really keeping track of drafts or versions, but best I can tell, it's on about version 7 or 8. Possibly twelve, if you count the attempts that were aborted before the end of chapter 1.

None of those versions ever made it to the end of draft 1. Many were written with completely different processes, but in each I could tell there was something fundamentally wrong with the book - not the writing, which is fixable, but the story, which is not.

I was getting rather discouraged with this - I had a plan, you see, to be writing full time. I'm a touch-typist and a trained student*: I can write quickly. When in the habit of it, I can write several thousand words a day, with time for exercise, general life and my day job. Put that into a routine and you have a draft in a few months. Add another few months for editing and polishing, and you have a book in four to six months. Combine that with the fact that these processes can be overlaid - I can plan one story while writing another and editing a third (I know this because I do it now), and I can have several books a year. 

That was The Plan. Roughly: self-publish several books a year, average not-very-many sales across all of them a month, and be able to write full time in five or six years at the current salary I get from my day job.

Taking three years for one book was throwing not just spanners, but hammers, screwdrivers, allen keys and a disgruntled plumber in the works. But this week, three important things happened for me and my plan - or rather, my disappointment in my plan.

The first was, I read the words of Ira Glass, which has chained itself through a number of writer blogs: 

"What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit.
Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

The second was another blog post, this time from indie-paranormal-romance-writer Zoe Winters who, despite her occasional use of her blog as a personal diary, often says some really insightful things. What I took from it wasn't, in fact, the point of her post, so I'll quote the pertinent section: 

Now when you’re *learning* narrative structure and you’re *learning* how to write a book, yes it can take longer. But when you know what you’re doing and what you want to say/do, you just don’t have thirty massive total overhaul rewrites to do. That’s pretty much an indication that you had no idea what you were doing. And we have all been there. That’s not a criticism. I’m just saying. When you’ve written a certain number of words, you hopefully get to the point where you know how to create a book and you know how to outline a book.

 I've been learning-about-writing, and writing with the goal of being published, since I was thirteen. That's half my life, now. I spent four years dedicated to learning and practising writing and character, and another two years learning about the publishing industry. I know all the theories about structure and plot and tension and characterisation and arcs and theme and premise and all the ingredients of story. 

But I haven't written that many books. Not to completion. I have a truly terrible manuscript sitting in the bottom drawer that one day I'll completely rewrite into something half-decent. But while I can pull apart any book and tell you what is and isn't working of all the various components and their interaction, I'm still learning how I create a book. 

Being able to analyse something and being able to create it are two different skills. They're related, but one is not a shortcut to the other.

Attempting to write the next scene in my novel lead me to the third 'thing' - the realisation that I was attempting to write a scene in a location that I hadn't actually invented yet. I'd replotted the novel, because there were glaring holes. And in replotting, I'd moved locations of a scene that hadn't otherwise changed. The location was somewhere I didn't have much of an idea of. Not the culture, not the geography, nothing. 

Because I hadn't sorted out my own process.

I used to write a lot of essays. I did literature and first-year-uni literature in highschool, creative writing, theatre studies and culture studies in undergraduate. I think in about year 10, I worked out how I wrote essays:

1. work out the question, what I would have to answer
2. work out what needed to be researched or read, what notes or arguments I wanted
3. [do said research, take notes]
4. plot essay structure, down to what information would be in each paragraph
5. write each paragraph, edit overall essay to make sure it flowed
6. finish

With that formula, I could finish an assignment in two evenings that was intended to take three weeks. If I'd had a laptop to take to the library in my early undergrad years, I probably could have cut that to a few hours. Plotting it out broke it down into small chunks that I didn't have to procrastinte about writing, and meant my research was targeted.

When I started writing novels, I had no idea of plot. Not really. I knew how to analyse, but not how to create. I spent a good number of teen years writing out plot longhand, under the assumption that plot was just a series of connected "and then,"s. That didn't work.

I tried pantsing when I first found Nano. I just pointed my imagination in a direction and started writing. It was great for worldbuilding, but there was no plot. Oh, there was Stuff That Happened, but that isn't plot. 

For my Terrible First Novel in the drawer, I tried Atchity's method of the 1500 index cards. I came up with them, filtered them, structured them, started writing with them. About a third of the way through I realised I'd been ignoring them for the past twenty pages and now they were totally irrelevant. Also, the few that were relevant I had no idea how to work in. The result technically had plot, but it was a plot on life-support that was too far down the transplant list.

I put things away for a while, and wrote short stories. I read, and learnt (and grew up a bit; that probably helped) and started paying attention to things like character arcs and theme. Things that I'd learned all about, but hadn't really figured out how to use. I discovered Dan Wells' seven point system, and some other systems that took a top-down approach. I started playing with things that way, working more top-down (but not quite as top-down as the snowflake method, which I feel gives me nothing to work with from the start.)

I found I had developed a system that seemed to work for me that was, oddly enough, extremely close to how I'd written essays:

1. work out the question, what I would have to answer premise, character arcs, what thejourney would be
2. work out what needed to be researched, what parts of a world I'd need to build, what characters I'd need
3. [do said research, take notes] [do the world and character building]
4. plot essay story structure:
   1. first in broad stages of the journey,
   2. then break each stage into scenes,
   3. and down into what information would be in each paragraph scene
5. write each paragraph scene, edit overall essay novel to make sure:
   1. there were transitions between each scene
   2. that the pacing and tension worked
   3. that the character arcs worked
   4. etc. There's a lot to edit.
6. finish hand to alpha readers, beta readers, etc. Then edit some more.

That really shouldn't surprise me. But because I hadn't realised my system, I'd forgotten steps - specifically, steps 2 and 3. I had replotted the novel, but I hadn't checked if this replotting meant I needed more research and worldbuilding.

My point, for this rather long-winded and tangentialised post (that's not a word), is that working out your process can help you see where you're going wrong with something, or why you're finding something difficult. It can help you break the task down into something less scary, easier to manage. But it's a long road. A friend of mine has decided she'll take each of her How To Write A Novel books and write their way for one book, and see how it works. If you don't have a large body of work behind you that you can ask how did I write you? that might work for you, too. But really, it's a matter of taking a hard look at yourself, how you do things, what your pitfalls are, and trying something that you think will work. Then deciding what about it helped or hindered.

But also remember that you're (probably) still learning. Until you have a couple of books under your belt, you're still learning. Which means it's all harder, there will be more mistakes, more dead ends, more things that don't work right now. So be patient with yourself - it's okay that, right now, what you're writing isn't up to your own standards yet. Because you have good taste, and you're working on it. 

Keep working, and one day you'll write what you do like.

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*as opposed to a student who exists to eat doritoes and sleep in until 2; trained students are adept at getting top marks at university while doing very little work.