Member-only story
Five Hard Truths About Writing I Wish I Accepted Sooner
Unpleasant realizations of someone who writes for a living
Writing is what pays my bills and fuels my dreams. Which means that I have to treat it as a job, or at least a competitive sport. Here are a few realizations I had after 2 years, 200+ articles and a couple million views.
1. Most successful writers write the same thing over and over again
Last night, I watched a discussion of 12 Nobel Prize laureates. One of them is Kazuo Ishiguro, a Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. Here’s what he said about his work:
“The surfaces of my novels are kind of… deceptive. People thin I keep moving on. Truth is, I keep writing the same thing over and over again obsessively. People don’t realize that because they have very different settings.”
This is by no means unique to Ishiguro. If you look around, you’ll see that the writers we consider successful are mostly iterating on that one narrative that works for them. They might milk the same topic, style or even phrasing to consistently see results. If you look at my most successful…
