Before I wrote book one, I had certain assumptions about what would be hard. The plot — making all the pieces fit, lacing the intrigue without giving away too much too soon. The dialogue — making it sound real. The sheer length of it – sustaining a story across hundreds of pages.
All of those things were, in their way, challenging. But this wasn’t the hardest part.
The actual hardest part
The hardest part was giving myself permission.
Permission to believe the story was worth telling. Permission to take the time — to sit down in the morning and write when there were emails to answer and clients to see and a thousand more obviously practical things to do. Permission to be a beginner at something at an age when most people do not start new things.
And permission to produce something imperfect. This last one was the deepest obstacle. As a psychologist, I am trained to be rigorous. My clinical notes have to be accurate. My assessments have to be defensible. Decades of professional practice had trained me to get things right.
Fiction does not work that way. A first draft is supposed to be imperfect. It is the raw material, not the finished product. But that permission — to write something that was not yet good enough — was harder to grant myself than anything the craft itself demanded.
How I solved it
I did not solve it, exactly. I just kept deciding, every morning, that the imperfect draft was better than the perfect blank page. That decision got easier over time. But it never became automatic.
What I would tell a beginning writer
The plot problems are solvable. The dialogue can be edited. The length can be managed one chapter at a time.
The permission is the thing you have to find yourself. Nobody can give it to you. But I can tell you that the story waiting on the other side of it is worth the asking.
Order In the Name of the Mother at https://janehudsonbooks.com/