I'm always growing as an author, always. Writing is a long form hobby. You don’t set out to ‘write a book’. You write regularly, and eventually, books come out. Same as going to the gym. You don’t have one goal and then you're done, it’s a commitment, and frankly a lifestyle choice (that often involves sacrificing being at social gatherings or other things). To me, with something so long form, it’s really valuable to have a reference for which to measure your progress against. What should you look for? Get excited about? What are good signs that progress is taking place? Well, everyone’s experiences are wildly different. But, I have noticed some trends in growth I think I can organize for a useful reference for folks. Or rather, “stages” that I’ve often seen people grow up and through (first and foremost including myself!).
I will base this blog post on two things. The first, and most important qualifier, being my own experience and hard work. The second, all of the innumerable amounts of aspiring authors across the experience ladder I’ve encountered hosting writing meet ups and critiques and the like over the course of the last decade. Of course this comes with all the usual caveats of me generalizing, your experience being your own, and the one rule above all others - having fun comes first!
A final starting note, the absolute fastest way to fast track this progression is to read, like, a lot. You’ll often notice that heavy readers you meet have already started higher up on the rungs than not. And while audiobooks (my favorite method of reading) are just as valid as text on a page, line editing and prose details are worth studying ‘eyes on the page’ for the authors you love and take influence from most.
Creative writing is an utterly overwhelming thing. Much like engineering or chess, there are a million considerations to balance in your head, each with their own ripple effects. Very understandably, ambitious new authors often embrace the advice of ‘just write’ (which is great advice!), and they quickly start the very long process of learning all of these lessons. This is certainly what I did. This entails learning all the basics like which tenses they want to use, dialogue, and voice. This is where you’ll see people prove to themselves for the first time that they have the discipline to sit down and even write a full book.
There’s a lot of ‘first’ lessons here. It’s not uncommon to see authors learn about the need for consistent point of view and tense. Likewise they often learn that finishing the first draft of their novel isn’t even the half of it, and editing is a whole beast of its own, and then the soul crushing agent querying process which feels still forever away. When I finished my first book, I was too new to even understand the basics of what I should care about in that process (beyond having fun of course, which is always priority uno). At this stage new authors often start learning what makes good dialogue, or at least what makes utterly awful dialogue and trying some basic attempts at avoiding that.
There’s a few common mistakes you’ll see at (but aren’t exclusive to) this stage of exploration. A very common one is ‘the dinning room table’ mistake. They shove 10 characters into a scene, all who need their own time with the microphone, and now the author is trying to juggle keeping them straight to the reader, which is tricky in the best of times and often goes quite poorly. From this, often authors will learn that they probably care quite a lot about being discerning with who gets to be center stage, who’s playing an active role in scenes, how characters are introduced, etc. Another common mistake, especially for epic fantasy/action authors, is intensity without stakes. The amount of fights or torture interrogation scenes I’ve read where I’m not given a reason to care (the main character is the one squeezing information out of another character) and the brutality unfortunately becomes brutality for the purposes of being edgy is always a bummer. You can see it on the page, the author desperate to get you to care, getting more and more violent… but the gears just aren’t there to let the scene turn. With the right feedback, most authors quickly realize what they’re missing are stakes, and they learn the basics of balancing those, or at least learning that is yet another spinning plate to be constantly balanced and managed. In general, for a variety of reasons (which I describe how to avoid in my Showing Versus Telling blog post) they get a lot of ‘showing not telling’ feedback, which is maddening if you don’t know how to translate that into actionable follow up editing. Or, worse, they’ll get feedback that critiquers couldn’t enjoyably get through their submissions in the slightest.
A harsh reality here, this is also often where many authors exist when they have their first story idea they’re passionate about. Everyone has ‘that one’. That one specific story that you are, or were, so passionate about that it led you down this path to taking this all so seriously in the first place. That one that you’ll dig your heels in for and do more work than the rest of folks and figure it out because it’s that deserving of seeing the light of day. You know, that one. Andddd, the soul crushing reality is the vast majority of these never see the light of day. Sure, part of that is because you’re a new author and trying to execute in writing that awesome story that’s been bouncing around in your head for 19 years, and that just takes way more skill than you (or I) have at this stage. But also, because that story was created by someone who doesn’t have a full idea of what makes a good story yet. Often times this looks like endless hours of world building with meh characters. Or it looks like very in depth characters with no interesting plot/throughline of a story to actually pull them through. It’s often just a massive jumble of ideas and characters that weren’t created to service the core mechanics. And to be clear, this is valid and fine! But it can be quite the disappointment to new authors when agents are less than enthusiastic to pick up their works.
This is also often authors’ first serious foray into critique circles. As a critiquer, they’re often just as new at providing feedback as they are at constructing their own art. And this isn’t bad! It’s simply learning, it's part of the fun! Often times at this stage, when handed a writing submission for their critique review that has serious flaws in it, they’re able to identify that it’s hot garbage, but don’t necessarily have the knowledge or concepts yet to articulate to themselves why that is. Often times they fall back on the knowledge they have, and hyper fixate on weird details or things niche specific to their own taste that aren’t necessarily as generically helping their fellow authors grow. This looks like fixating on a magic system, on specific line editing decisions and failing to give the submitting author some grace and look past the grammatical draft errors and interact with the substance of the piece, etc.
Alright, so that’s the starting point! That’s usually where people exist for the first few years of their writing hobby/career. That usually takes writing a full book (if that’s the type of author you’re striving to be) to grow past, and even then, the first book you write will heavily still be in this category. But that is to say, often times people casually initially poke around at writing for years existing at this rung (which is fantastic, it’s supposed to be for fun! Have fun with it), and it usually takes someone’s first attempt at being very disciplined and serious (AKA completing a full book or two) that gets them past this.
Depending on where you fall on the anxiety scale of ‘read every book on writing before typing a single word’ to ‘just write’, the next step in author growth is usually a turn toward what I’d call an architect phase. Whereas the previous stage tends to focus on the mechanics of how to translate your ideas onto the page in a comprehensible way, this is when authors start to tackle the idea of ‘a story’ more comprehensively. Stories have structure and beats and formulas. This is generally the first time that an author starts to have ideas that are genuinely more introspective into the craft than any random bloak off the street that just tends to be sort of sharp.
For many, this phase is inspired by some really harsh lessons from the prior phase. Sometimes that looks like having spent years working on a story, or having failed to successful query an agent, etc. people realizing just how untenable and large a hobby it is and how many plates there are to juggle and desperately looking for help in organizing the chaos. This is often when people make the healthy transition from ‘I’m going to write that one book’ to ‘I want to be an author’ (usually for fun), that it will be a long form activity spanning the rest of their lives.
All of this very often culminates into seeking out resources: Save The Cat (Writes A Novel), Scene and Structure, various resources on The Three Act Structure. And this is all great. This is where writers have some initial hard learned lessons in their head and figure that it sure would be awesome if they could just think ahead, or gain a better intuition to a similar effect (I haven’t forgotten about all you pantsers out there!) they could avoid encountering all that pain again….
Yeah, as you might have guessed, this falls quite short. Unfortunately, simply arranging all of the ‘beats’ that a story will need, in order, doesn’t actually get you that much if you’re not knowledgeable on how to wield the story at your finger tips. Sometimes authors even see their writing seem worse, because now they’re balancing wayyyy more plates but without the experience to wield them all best. This was certainly me. A sort of ‘over thinking it’ syndrome.
This will often look like stories that seem sane from a birds eye view, but implode upon execution. Stories that fail to ever gain a reader’s interest because the character’s motivations aren’t clear. They can confuse the reader because the causation between scenes isn’t so clear or because the idea is really ambitious and thrashes the reader around without respecting the fundamentals. Stories that seem too busy. Or stories that seem too railroaded and staged. There’s so many colorful ways to go wrong at this stage… but it’s a beautiful thing in a way. At this stage your making the correct kind of errors. Learning more targeted lessons from them, learning the language for how to articulate problems and desires to yourself and others as an author.
As a critiquer you're often able to pick up on large, blinking light, problems successfully. These are some of the first interactions you will have with other authors where you can tell them why you don’t like something, and what they might be able to do to change that. “What does your main character actually want? What’s their concrete goal?” Or maybe “I didn’t understand why this scene/character was included, it didn’t feel relevant?”. You can start to form some awesome critique questions, even if you can’t give pinpointed advice in pointing out the actual mistake being made.
This next stage of growth is the stage when authors usually start to realize that the vast, vast, vast majority of creative writing takes place in between line editing and story architecture. That, between the granularity of your grammar on the page, and the thousand-yard-view of your story, is where you’ll really end up expending most of your time and energy.
This is a really exciting time! For me, this was 5 or 7 years into my writing career. Likewise it’s often when you’ve finally found that one critique group that’s really right for you. That gives you that amazing feedback to help you grow into the author you want to be without pushing you into the box of the author they want to be, this is some of the first times where you’ll hand people you know a scene and they will come back looking genuinely shocked and say “wow, that was actually really good, I’m not kidding”. Now… that’s far from always, more of a rarity at first. But oh boy does it feel good.
I’d argue this is where you start to identify the true essentials of a first draft of a story: character, causation, and throughline. And through identifying them, start trying to thread and play with them in a meaningfully creative way. Having the lens you need to take the initial steps of ‘tools not rules’ where you feel safe playing with cliches but not relying on them as crutches.
Fortunately for you weary writers out there, this phase is the first phase that’s really hallmarked not by the types of mistakes you tend to make, but the success you start to notice yourself having. People may start to notice that your characters shine a bit more than they had, often times this is when your ability to wield internationalization as an author feels better. People may genuinely express interest and excitement in your submissions because the stakes were so clear and well managed that they feel excited and compelled to learn how things unfold. Somewhat counter intuitively, critiquers will start to point out line edit level details, sentences or phrases, that really resonated with them - because you nailed all of the rest of the basic blocks allowing them to successfully dive in, focus, and enjoy at that level of detail. (It’s hard to critique the minute architectural decisions of a building that wasn’t built on solid foundations and outright collapsed.)
This is likewise where authors tend to start learning more about their preferences and interests in crafting character arcs and more granularity tracking change and growth. Same goes for tension and stakes, and hooks and hangers on chapters and scenes.
This is often the phase where writers tend to gain enough experience to engage to the fullest extent possible with their work. They can go back and read their work and articulate things they like or that their missing and crave. They can pluck out motivations, misbeliefs, meaningful progress/change, causation, throughline, stakes, relevance, internalization, and more. Funny enough, having all of these tools often also leads to a renaissance in reevaluating all of your basic building blocks. What voice do you want to have? What internalization and what types of characters do you want? It’s a very freeing and exciting time. And as always, it’s still a lot of work, because just because you can now identify and articulate mistakes, doesn’t mean you still don’t make them!
This can be a bit maddening as an author, because you have all the tools you need now, so why do you keep stepping in all of those piles of crap? If only you could steer this damned ship better! Unfortunately, this can also be a really stressful time as an author, where you find yourself paralyzed with indecision or compromising with imperfection. Where you find yourself ‘false starting’ writing the first half of a story over and over and over and giving up because you recognize your failures when you go back and read big chunks of your manuscript.
As a critiquer people will love you. Often times you are able to meaningfully listen to a writer talk about how they feel about a piece, read it, and articulate back to them why they’re feeling that way. You suddenly have a really powerful perspective of someone who has a true ‘journeyman’ expertise of the craft and can meaningfully assist others as much as yourself. This also often allows you to provide harsher and more cutting criticism in polite and professional ways that are fact based, with multiple examples, pointing out basic truths of a submission and comparing that to what the usual is, as opposed to being stuck just speaking about how you feel about something (which is of course, also always valid and great).
Now your a licensed pilot! This is the first stage where you have the ability to recognize mistakes in real time, and steer the ship accordingly. Or, to at least slam on the gas, ask all of the appropriate question, offer good answers and fixes, and then continue humming along happily. In the prior phase, you were capable of recognizing mistakes, but only after they’d sat with you and you’d mulled them over for quite a while, and oftentimes once you’d gotten a third or half way into your manuscript or more. This right here is better though, this is recognizing mistakes as they’re happening!
This often looks like recognizing your own loss of interest, or your own cravings, as you’re putting the words on the page (or, within a few 1k of doing so). Being able to write a chapter or two, lean back, and say “wow, I really don’t give a fuck, and that’s a problem”. Or being able to stop and recognize the voice or the character or whatever it may be isn’t singing to you, and usually, to have a strong idea of what you're craving instead. This phase is great because it’s the first time you truly become a more efficient writer. The first time that, should you chose to, you can be more discerning in your approach, and not have to slam out draft after draft just to have a chance to see your mistakes and correct them (although many still chose and prefer this method for a lot of very valid process and preference reasons). Although, to be clear, this is just a fact of life and writing to some extent regardless, you will never escape this fully, but it will get much better. This starts to hit the point where you could manage just a few drafts and be fine with it. And the changes and decisions you're making in between drafts starts to transcend from merely fixing problems that will lose your readers, to truly making artistic decisions based off of how you’d like to express yourself.
Funny enough, this level of basic mastery empowers you to really start to have much more opinions. Whereas in many of the earlier tiers, there isn’t a ton of room to debate if your causation is weak, your stakes are missing, etc. all of those are very factual, fixable, things. But now - fellow writer - you have transcended into the world of having enough mastery to really bring meaningfully creativity to you art with style, and in ways people will notice. And having a fluency with all of the pitfalls someone can make as an author also enables you to realize when someone is a great author and isn’t making any pitfalls at all, but simply isn’t for you, or inverse. To be able to say, “amazing author, definitely not for me.” Or even to recognize lackluster work in others, or to more readily understand your peers. For example, at this stage I was once handed a literary fiction romance novel that my friend swore to the moon and back about, as good as it gets she said. Well, ten pages in, it’s only telling. “She liked burritos. She didn’t like chess. She was the type of girl that would tell you if you left your fly undone.” I hated this. It’s just telling. If I did that in a fantasy novel, I have no doubt my friend would instantly point out I’m info dumping. But because it’s in a genre, and on a topic, that she has a soft spot for, she loved it. And that’s great! No insults meant here, but what I do mean to say is that, once you know the basics quite well, you feel confident in disagreeing with people and shrugging off your difference in tastes that might show up in critiques because you feel confident in the building blocks backing up your technique and art.”
As a critiquer, one of the biggest changes I’ve noticed here is confidence. You’re not just attempting your best feedback, you quite confidently know what you’re talking about. Confidence, and priority. Not only can you pick out the problems in a submission, but you can easily float up the top two an author needs to work on to fix it. This is especially useful because writers aren’t going to remember all of your critiques, and often times the page by page comments aren’t useful to string together into a large narrative about the piece. Being able to say “You didn’t have a clear throughline, and the stakes fall off after X point,” can be really powerful and actionable feedback to a writer!”
It's funny, I really expected this next stage of growth here to be something akin to steering a ship with radar. But nope, not quite. Funny enough, in this stage I almost accepted the opposite. There is no such thing as a perfect early draft, and you’ll kill yourself trying. There's a balance here. Past this stage I still feel confident in keeping my stories to writing just a few drafts. But, some things just aren’t worth over optimizing for. When drafting I care about the basics: throughline, causation, and character. I’ve likewise learned to watch for stakes more, as well as theme. I tend to view my writing in ‘how much am I pulling at my readers emotional heart strings, and how much is my plot torturing my character in the precise way that challenges their misbelief’. I’ve likewise become a lot more introspective about how I’m managing my readers' emotions, not just what I’m telling them to feel - trying to exercise Emotional Truths that are beyond the expected. (Think the opening of Fahrenheit 451, where the MC is excited to be burning books, or everything I’m communicating by not saying as much as the things I am by saying. There’s a million different rabbit holes to explore at this stage, and everyone will find different ones.
BUT - there is one common thread here. A strong, strong, strong rekindled craving to learn given your new understanding. At this stage I feel really confident in the basics, and hell, maybe even some of the intermediary stuff. For me, and my friends, this has really inspired going back and studying works they like. In this stage I’ll see folks intensely annotating their favorite books. I’ll see them share wild realizations about why their favorite pieces work so well. I’ll see them explore with intent in meaningfully ways how to pull emotions out of readers. As far as approach goes, I often see (and this is so me by the way), periods of intense study and craft books and the like, rapidly replaced by ‘fuck it let’s just have fun’ phases. A complete contradictory awe of the amazing authors who had come before you and all of the amazing craft books you’d probably missed before, in conflict with the realization that if you can’t just stare at a blank page and plan forever.
Interesting enough, I have not seen a major change in feedback and critique at this stage. Call it hubiris, but I’m increasingly convinced because that is where some limit exists. That, at some point, this is all just art and preference - and words can only do so much to meaningfully offer help for growth across people with different preferences and perspectives. At some point some people just will like your weird vampire romance novel, and others won’t.
I'll have to come back in a year or two as a grow more!
One of the funnest things about writing is the growth. It takes a long time to get good at, and it gets more fun the better you are at it. Enjoying that progression, and enjoying learning in a hands on way, is what keeps you coming back for more, seeing people light up when they connect with what you’ve put on the page, and feeling that confidence in how to articulate yourself, is really fun! Given that it’s such a long form hobby, it can be hard to know where you’re at and to see that progression. Especially given how brutal the publishing industry can be. Hopefully this offers some anchor points to introspect from and consider where you’re at.
Enjoy!